Asthma in children of Caribbean descent living in the inner-city: comparing Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean children

Ethnic minority children bear a disproportionate amount of the US asthma burden. We compared asthma morbidity and pulmonary function (%FEV₁) in two Caribbean groups living in the Bronx, NY: Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean children. Caregiver-child dyads (Puerto Rican: n = 113, M age = 9.89 ± 2.05; Afro-Caribbean: n = 47, Mage = 10.35 ± 2.08) responded to sociodemographic and asthma-related questions, and children’s %FEV₁ was measured. Puerto Rican children had significantly greater (past year) asthma morbidity, yet there were no significant differences in %FEV₁. This discrepancy between objective pulmonary function and asthma morbidity suggests the importance of considering sociocultural factors in pediatric asthma care.     

Fight,Flight, or Remain Silent? Juggling Multiple Accountabilities throughout the Formative Stage of a Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative

This paper describes the experiences of a research team as they navigated uncertain ethical and political terrain throughout the formative stage of a public housing redevelopment project. Specifically, we discuss the challenges related to balancing multiple accountabilities and the tensions among the various roles and responsibilities that emanated from different accountabilities. Due to contractual obligations to our funding source, established relations with community partners, and an ethical imperative to align with those holding the least power, we grappled with embodying multiple and often conflicting roles. Without oversight provided by our university institutional review board or a clear ethical framework for community psychology research and action, our team was left to negotiate the challenges that emerged through critical reflection and financial considerations. Throughout the case example presented in this paper, we highlight our difficulty in ethical decision‐making with respect to the principles of obligation, disclosure, consent, commitment, and professionalism. Community psychologists often straddle the realms of academia, community partnerships, and conscious engagement with little guidance in navigating often conflicting roles and value systems. We present our narrative to highlight the complexity of scholar‐activism in the context of community psychology and the necessity for developing ethical standards and guidelines tailored to meet the unique needs of community psychologists.     

The Last Night of Freedom: Consumerism,Deviance and the “Stag Party”

This article offers an ethnographic examination of the stag party phenomenon in the United Kingdom. Stag parties have become socially expected as a rite of passage, pre-marriage celebration for men that usually involves excessive alcohol consumption and engagement in deviant, potentially harmful, behavior. These events produce a shift in time and space, and together with group expectations for celebration, increase the impetus for excessive consumption. Our contention is that excessive consumption of alcohol and deviant behavior that often takes place are partially rooted in commercial ideology, which has become firmly embedded in the attitudes of young British men.     

The effect of the order in which episodic autobiographical memories versus autobiographical knowledge are shared on feelings of closeness

Autobiographical memories (AMs) can be used to create and maintain closeness with others [Alea, N., &; Bluck, S. (2003). Why are you telling me that? A conceptual model of the social function of autobiographical memory. Memory, 11(2), 165–178]. However, the differential effects of memory specificity are not well established. Two studies with 148 participants tested whether the order in which autobiographical knowledge (AK) and specific episodic AM (EAM) are shared affects feelings of closeness. Participants read two memories hypothetically shared by each of four strangers. The strangers first shared either AK or an EAM, and then shared either AK or an EAM. Participants were randomly assigned to read either positive or negative AMs from the strangers. Findings suggest that people feel closer to those who share positive AMs in the same way they construct memories: starting with general and moving to specific.     

The relationships between parenting stress,parenting behaviour and preschoolers' social competence and behaviour problems in the classroom

Young children develop social and emotional competence through interactions with others in the two major contexts in which they spend time: home and preschool. This study examined whether parenting stress in the home context is related to the children's behaviour while in preschool. Previous research has suggested that parenting stress negatively influences parenting behaviour, which in turn has been shown to impact children's development. This study examined the direct relationship between parenting stress and children's behaviour in two types of preschool programmes: private day care centres and Head Start. Parenting stress was significantly related to teacher ratings of social competence, internalizing behaviours, and externalizing behaviours, and the effects of parenting behaviour do not appear to mediate this relationship. Parenting stress was most strongly related to children's social competence. Parents' reports of expectations for their child's behaviour appear to weakly moderate the relationship between externalizing behaviour and parenting stress. This study suggests that examination of a parent's level of stress, in addition to parenting practices, may be important in research and interventions with preschool children's behaviour and social competence. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personality patterns of physicians in person-oriented and technique-oriented specialties

This study investigated differences in personality patterns between person-oriented and technique-oriented physicians. It tested an integrative framework by converting the scores on the Personality Research Form (PRF) to the Big-Five factors and built a predictive model of group membership in clinical specialty area. PRF scores from 238 physicians (153 person-oriented and 85 technique-oriented) were used for this retrospective study. Significant personality differences between group means existed for seven of the traits on the PRF and two Big-Five factors. Results of a stepwise discriminant analysis indicated that two PRF traits and one Big-Five factor had the greatest ability to discriminate between person-oriented and technique-oriented physicians. Findings of this study provide support for establishing personality profiles of physicians interested in person-oriented versus technique-oriented specialties. Examining personality differences among male and female physicians is discussed as an area for future research.     

Contributions of processing ability and knowledge to verbal memory tasks across the adult life-span

This study investigated the relationships of processing capacity and knowledge to memory measures that varied in retrieval difficulty and reliance on verbal knowledge in an adult life-span sample (N = 341). It was hypothesized that processing ability (speed and working memory) would have the strongest relationship to tasks requiring active retrieval and that knowledge (vocabulary ability) would be related to verbal fluency and cued recall, as participants relied upon verbal knowledge to retrieve category items (fluency) or develop associations (cued recall). Measurement and structural equation models were developed for the entire sample and separately for younger (aged 20-54 years, n = 168) and older (aged 55-92 years, n = 173) subgroups. In accordance with the hypotheses, processing ability was found to be most highly related to free recall, with additional significant relationships to cued recall, verbal fluency, and recognition. Knowledge was found to be significantly related only to verbal fluency and to cued recall. Moreover, knowledge was more important for older than for younger adults in mediating variance in cued recall, suggesting that older adults may use age-related increases in knowledge to partially compensate for processing declines when environmental support is available in memory tasks.