Reducing Youth Access to Alcohol: Findings from a Community-Based Randomized Trial

Underage drinking continues to be an important public health problem and a challenge to the substance abuse prevention field. Community-based interventions designed to more rigorously control underage access to alcohol through retailer education and greater enforcement of underage drinking laws have been advocated as potentially effective strategies to help address this problem, but studies designed to evaluate such interventions are sparse. To address this issue we conducted a randomized trial involving 36 communities to test the combined effectiveness of five interrelated intervention components designed to reduce underage access to alcohol. The intervention was found to be effective in reducing the likelihood that retail clerks would sell alcohol to underage-looking buyers, but did not reduce underage drinking or the perceived availability of alcohol among high school students. Post hoc analyses, however, revealed significant associations between the level of underage drinking law enforcement in the intervention communities and reductions in both 30-day use of alcohol and binge drinking. The findings highlight the difficulty in reducing youth drinking even when efforts to curtail retail access are successful. Study findings also suggest that high intensity implementation of underage drinking law enforcement can reduce underage drinking. Any such effects of enhanced enforcement on underage drinking appear to be more directly attributable to an increase in perceived likelihood of enforcement and the resultant perceived inconveniences and/or sanctions to potential drinkers, than to a reduction in access to alcohol per se.     

Adlerian family counseling: An evaluation

Abstract

A number of studies have been reported recently evaluating the effects of one or another form of intervention based on Adlerian principles (Freeman, 1975; Croake and Burness, 1976; Berrett, 1975; McKay, 1976; see also McDonough, 1976, for a review of other studies). Unfortunately, there are a number of problems in attempting to draw any general conclusions from these studies. First, a number of different types of Adlerian-based programs have been included, such as mother study groups, undefined parent study groups, and so on. Second, many of the studies were uncontrolled so that statements regarding the causes of any changes cannot be inferred. Third, many of the studies did not utilize adequate measures of child behavior (positive changes in which are an important goal of Adlerian family education programs), and instead relied on changes in parent attitudes.     

Working With Couples and Substance Abuse: Recommendations for Clinical Practice

Misuse of alcohol and drugs is widespread in modern society with the associated emotional and physical tolls on individuals, couples, and families. Yet, many therapists do not assess nor address substance misuse when clients do not identify it as a presenting problem. This article presents an overview of the literature on key aspects of couples and substance use and makes important clinical recommendations for mental health professionals who work with couples that struggle with substance use.     

A COMPARISON OF SEMANTIC‐ AND MNEMONIC‐BASED VOCABULARY‐LEARNING STRATEGIES

Fourth‐ and fifth‐grade students were taught the meanings of new vocabulary items according to one of three instructional strategies. Two of the strategies were semantic‐based (contextual analysis and semantic mapping), and the other strategy was mnemonic‐based (the keyword method). Consistent with recent research findings, the keyword method facilitated students’ recall of the vocabulary items’ definitions, and this was true in both higher‐ and lower‐achieving subject populations. In the higher‐achieving sample, the keyword method was also superior to the contextual analysis strategy on two vocabulary‐usage tests, one that was administered on the day immediately following instruction and one that was administered a week later. Mean performance on a one‐week delayed definition‐matching test was statistically equivalent in the three conditions, although in the higher‐achieving sample a reliably higher proportion of keyword subjects than contextual analysis subjects attained perfect scores on that test. No significant difference between the two semantic‐ based strategies was found on any of the dependent measures. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are included in the discussion.     

Paradigmatic Assumptions of Disciplinary Research on Gender Disparities: The Case of Occupational Sex Segregation

Lips (2012) deconstructs the standard methodological approaches to understanding the gender wage gap and shows that issues of gender pervade nearly every assumption of these models. In this commentary, we call attention to paradigmatic assumptions and theoretical approaches of the three most relevant social-science disciplines that deal with a parallel issue—occupational sex segregation—to demonstrate that scientific progress is facilitated by transparency in our disciplinary approaches to addressing gender disparities. Accordingly, the neoclassical economic approach to occupational sex segregation posits, among other things, self-selection in the development of human capital, such as choice of college major, as well as women’s tradeoffs in marriage vs. work-related capital as the drivers of occupational disparities. Progressive sociological approaches, such as feminist and Marxist sociology eschew these “supply-side” explanations in favor of examining “demand-side” explanations, particularly social forces that shape both employers’ beliefs about desirable worker attributes as well as the institutional structures that are created to support these views. Psychological approaches tend to address both supply-side (e.g., vocational preferences) and demand-side (e.g., stereotypes and bias) explanations. The aim of this commentary is to elucidate the paradigmatic approaches that each of the major social-science disciplines takes in understanding gender inequity issues in order to advance integrated research on these important social topics.     

Televised Sexual Content and Parental Mediation: Influences on Adolescent Sexuality

Little research has been conducted to examine the influence of exposure to televised sexual content on adolescent sexuality or how parental intervention may reduce negative effects of viewing such content. This study uses self-report data from 1,012 adolescents to investigate the relations among exposure to sexually suggestive programming, parental mediation strategies, and three types of adolescent sexuality outcomes: participation in oral sex and sexual intercourse, future intentions to engage in these behaviors, and sex expectancies. As predicted, exposure to sexual content was associated with an increased likelihood of engaging in sexual behaviors, increased intentions to do so in the future, and more positive sex expectancies. Often, parental mediation strategies were a significant factor in moderating these potential media influences.     

Adolescent Decisional Autonomy Regarding Participation in an Emergency Department Youth Violence Interview

Much attention has been given to determining whether an adolescent patient has the capacity to consent to research. This study explores the factors that influence adolescents' decisions to participate in a research study about youth violence and to determine positive or negative feelings elicited by being a research subject. The majority of subjects perceived their decision to participate to be free of coercion, and few felt badly about having participated. However, adolescents who were alone in the room during the assent process were more likely to report that they chose freely to be a research subject. This study may influence the ways physicians communicate with adolescent patients around research assent within a clinical care environment.     

Response Inhibition and the Rorschach ‘M’ Response

Previous research indicated that a relationship existed between production of the Rorschach M response and inhibition of motor activity. The present study investigated this relationship under conditions which approximated those involved in the normal process of impulse control. Volunteer college students were used as subjects. Ss who engaged in a response inhibition task subsequently produced significantly more M responses than did Ss who had engaged in a noninhibitory task. This supported the hypothesis that M is an indication of the tendency to deal with impulses through fantasy.     

Disappearing Percepts: Evidence for Retention Failure in Metacontrast Masking

Results from a number of paradigms (including change blindness, inattentional blindness, integration over saccades, and backward masking) suggest that most of the visual information we take in is not retained, even for very short periods of time. This has led some to question whether such information is ever really perceived. We examine this issue using a variant of the classic metacontrast stimulus. When a briefly presented disk is followed by a briefly presented ring, observers may report not seeing the disk. Rather they report seeing the ring flicker as if the change in form from disk to ring is not recorded. This effect is highly dependent on the interval between the onset of the disk and the onset of the ring (the “stimulus onset asynchrony” or SOA). The maximum effect is usually found at a critical SOA of about 50 msec. Here we show that the ability of observers to distinguish such a disk/ring pair from a flickering ring is dependent also on how soon after the stimulus they respond. Early responses show a much smaller masking effect than late responses: Near the critical SOA accuracy improves when the observer responds more quickly (the opposite of the standard speed-accuracy trade-off), although at longer and shorter SOAs observers are less accurate on these early responses (a typical speed-accuracy trade-off). We interpret this finding as demonstrating that, at least in the case of metacontrast, retention of form information is disrupted, rather than initial access.