Abortion among adolescents

In most countries, adolescents' access to abortion is limited by restrictions on legal abortion. Abortion is legal in the United States, but many states require parental consent or notification. Legislation mandating parental consent has been justified by several assumptions, including high risk of psychological harm from abortion, adolescents' inability to make an adequately informed decision, and benefits of parental involvement. Empirical data raise questions about the first 2 assumptions: Studies suggest a relatively low risk associated with abortion, and adolescents seeking abortion appear to make an informed choice. Less is known about effects of parental involvement. The authors review available research and discuss policy debates over parental consent in the United States and the international context.     

Rights to privacy in research: adolescents versus parents

Conducting research on adolescents raises a number of ethical issues not often confronted in research on younger children. In part, these differences are due to the fact that although assent is usually not an issue, given cognitive and social competencies, the life situations and behavior of youth make it more difficult to balance rights and privacy of the adolescents. In this article, the three ethical principles of beneficence, justice, and respect for persons are discussed in terms of their application to the study of adolescents. Then, seven vignettes are presented to illustrate how these principles apply to real-life situations. How to balance the rights of adolescents and their parents is discussed, using adolescent girls and their parents for illustrative purposes.     

Identity and Difference: A Hundred Years of Analytic Philosophy

At its origins, analytic philosophy is an interest in language, science, logic, analysis, and a systematic rather than a historical approach to philosophical problems. Early analytic philosophers were famous for making clear conceptual distinctions and for couching them in comprehensible and lucid sentences. It is argued that this situation is changing, that analytic philosophy is turning into its mirror image and is thereby becoming more like the kind of philosophy that it used to oppose.     

Dynamic and Static Work-Family Relationships

This study investigated the linkages between work and family of 281 dual-employed couples. First, we developed a theoretical framework, distinguishing between the causal direction and the sign of the relationship between work and family. We classified the social and psychological mechanisms that explain specific directions and signs of work–family relationships and reviewed the empirical literature from the point of view of this framework. We then provided an illustration of how this framework can be used to generate a model for a specific sample. We generated a model and corresponding hypotheses for a sample of dual-employed couples in which the male′s career was dominant and analyzed these hypotheses by testing males and females separately using LISREL 7. In our sample, the relationship between work and family was reciprocal for males, suggesting a dynamic system in which males were able to adjust one domain to compensate for the other. Females exhibited a unidirectional relationship from family to work involvement, suggesting a static system. For both males and females, the family → work involvement relationship was negative as hypothesized. For males, the work → family relationship was positive. There were some similarities and some differences in the influence of exogenous constructs in the models for males and females. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of understanding dynamic versus static models of work and family relationships and the potential role of organizations in helping their employees lower the fixed demands of the family.     

Venturing a 30-year longitudinal study

Longitudinal inquiry has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful method for seeking understanding of psychological development. A 30-year longitudinal venture is described--its theoretical motivation, methodological rationale, and details of implementation. Some of the novel and implicative findings the study has generated are briefly described. Common to all of the results is an absolute reliance on long-term, widely ranging, independent data. Although specific aspects of the study have appeared over the years, its intentions and scope are recounted only here. By and large, the organizing constructs of ego-control and ego-resiliency find impressive support in various empirical inquiries, here quickly described. Methodologically, a number of savvy research procedures useful and perhaps even necessary in longitudinal research are conveyed. The troublesome burdens but ever-alluring attractions of longitudinal inquiry are noted. A forthcoming Web site will contain the extensive 30-year longitudinal data bank together with explanatory information. Psychological investigators may find these imminently available data resources useful.     

Acculturation, parent-adolescent conflict, and adolescent adjustment in Mexican American families

We tested an acculturation model in a community sample of Mexican American families (146 mothers, 137 fathers, and 146 adolescents) that proposed that differences between parents and adolescents in acculturation would be associated with parent-adolescent conflict and adolescent adjustment problems. Contrary to hypotheses, we found that families who exhibited an acculturation gap were not more likely to report parent-adolescent conflict or adolescent adjustment problems. In fact, familial conflict and adolescent sexual experience were associated with high levels of acculturation among adolescents and their parents. Pending replication, these findings suggest that both parent and children acculturation may independently predict familial processes and youth outcomes, irrespective of an acculturation gap. Future research should consider other factors aside from acculturation differences that might account for parent-adolescent conflict and adolescent adjustment in Mexican American families.     

Cultural variation in affect valuation

The authors propose that how people want to feel ("ideal affect") differs from how they actually feel ("actual affect") and that cultural factors influence ideal more than actual affect. In 2 studies, controlling for actual affect, the authors found that European American (EA) and Asian American (AA) individuals value high-arousal positive affect (e.g., excitement) more than do Hong Kong Chinese (CH). On the other hand, CH and AA individuals value low-arousal positive affect (e.g., calm) more than do EA individuals. For all groups, the discrepancy between ideal and actual affect correlates with depression. These findings illustrate the distinctiveness of ideal and actual affect, show that culture influences ideal affect more than actual affect, and indicate that both play a role in mental health.     

The Personality Assessment Inventory Drug Problems Scale: a validity analysis

An analysis of the relationship among the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991, 1996) Drug Problems (DRG) scale scores, the Addiction Severity Index (ASI; McLellan et al., 1992) scores, and urine toxicology reports revealed that the PAI Drug Problem scale scores of 100 substance-using and substance-abusing men and women were distributed in a manner that was in agreement with the guidelines suggested by Morey (1991, 1996) in the PAI manual. There were significant correlations among the PAI DRG scale and the ASI scales related to frequency of use, negative consequences of use, and need and desire for treatment. Overall, higher scores did reflect both more serious involvements with drug use and more serious problems as a consequence of their involvement.