Method of transportation and drinking among club patrons

ObjectiveThe current study examines the variation in alcohol use among nightclub patrons under three transportation conditions: those who departed from a club using modes of transportation other than cars or motorcycles (e.g., pedestrians, bicyclists, subway riders); those who were passengers of drivers (auto/taxi passenger patrons); and those who drove from the club (driving patrons). We seek to determine whether patrons’ choice for how to leave the club contributes to their risk, as assessed by blood alcohol concentrations (BAC), after controlling for other factors that may contribute to their BAC including demographic characteristics and social drinking group influences.MethodsData were collected from social drinking groups as they entered and exited clubs for 71 different evenings at ten clubs from 2010 through 2012. Using portal methodology, a research site was established proximal to club entrances. Each individual participant provided data on themselves and others in their group. The present analyses are based upon 1833 individuals who completed both entrance and exit data. Our outcome variable is blood alcohol content (BAC) based upon breath tests attained from patrons at entrance and exit from the club. Independent variables include method of transportation, social group characteristics, drug use, and personal characteristics. We use step-wise multiple regressions to predict entrance BAC, change in BAC from entrance to exit, and exit BAC: first entering individual demographic characteristics, then entering group characteristics, then drug use, and finally entering method of transportation (two dummy coded variables such that drivers are the referent category).ResultsIn sum, in all three of our analyses, only three variables are consistently predictive of BAC: presence of a group member who is frequently drunk and non-driving modes of transportation, either being the passenger or taking alternate methods of transportation. In particular, taking an alternate form of transportation was consistently and strongly predictive of higher BAC.ConclusionsAdditional public health messages are needed to address patrons who are no longer drinking and driving but who are nonetheless engaged in high levels of drinking that may lead to various risky outcomes, for example: being targeted for physical and/or sexual assault, pedestrian accidents, and other adverse consequences. These risks are not addressed by the focus on drinking and driving. Key messages appropriate for patrons who use alternate transportation might include devising a safety plan before entering the club and a focus on sobering up before leaving.     

Emotions of austerity: Care and commitment in public service delivery in the North East of England

In the context of an austerity agenda, constructed through the deployment of aversive emotions, we offer a more-than-rational understanding of uneven austerity politics for organisations providing public services with marginalised groups. The article highlights how emotions are at the heart of the experiences of those delivering services in the North East of England. It considers the emotional toll of changes under austerity on the professional lives of participants, but also those impacts which relate to wider interpretations of loyalty and care beyond individual participants. Due to the nature of occupational roles which involve an ethos and practice of commitment, and through relations with decision makers, colleagues, service users and community over time, participants are engaged in a range of emotional work. We explore how recent experiences have highlighted a continued and in some cases accelerated undermining of their work and communities of which they are, in different ways, a part. However, they are also seen as generative of a set of significant emotionally charged responses to such challenges, which variously challenge and conform to the dominant discourse of austerity.     

Improving Public Perception of Behavior Analysis

The potential impact of behavior analysis is limited by the public’s dim awareness of the field. The mass media rarely cover behavior analysis, other than to echo inaccurate negative stereotypes about control and punishment. The media instead play up appealing but less-evidence-based approaches to problems, a key example being the touting of dubious diets over behavioral approaches to losing excess weight. These sorts of claims distort or skirt scientific evidence, undercutting the fidelity of behavior analysis to scientific rigor. Strategies for better connecting behavior analysis with the public might include reframing the field’s techniques and principles in friendlier, more resonant form; pushing direct outcome comparisons between behavior analysis and its rivals in simple terms; and playing up the “warm and fuzzy” side of behavior analysis.     

The breadth and mnemonic consequences of the youth bias

We have recently demonstrated the existence of the youth bias, referring to a tendency to favour adolescence and early adulthood over other lifetime periods when making inferences about the timing of important public events across the lifespan of a typical individual within one's culture. The youth bias integrates two discrete lines of research, that is, the literature on the privileged status of adolescence and early adulthood in human memory and cognition, and the literature on cognitive biases. Here we first examined whether the youth bias holds for specific categories of public events (i.e., deaths of public figures, United States presidential elections, and sporting events). We then investigated the possible role of the youth bias in structuring recall for public events, by probing, within subjects, for the relation between: (1) these expectations of the timing, in a typical person's life, of the most important exemplar from each public event category, and (2) the age at which the cited event occurred on a recall question asking participants to cite the most important exemplar, in their own lifetime, from each category. We found a youth bias for each category. Additionally, responses to the youth bias question were correlated with the age at which the recalled event occurred, but only where particularly salient historical events did not play a central role in driving recall (i.e., for sporting events). We conclude that the youth bias holds across different types of public events and provides a default structure for organizing recall of public events.     

Perceived risk of using shared mobility services during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused our daily routines to change quickly. The pandemic provokes public fear, resulting in changes in what modes of transport people use to perform their daily activities. It is imperative for transportation authorities to properly identify the different degrees of behavioral change among various social groups. A major factor that can substantially explain individuals’ behavioral changes is the personal risk perceptions toward using shared mobility solutions. Thus, this study explores the risk that individuals perceive while using public transit and ridesharing services (as the most widespread forms of shared mobility) during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we designed and implemented a multidimensional travel-behavior survey in the Chicago metropolitan area that comprises socio-demographic information and retrospective questions related to attitudes and travel behavior before and during the pandemic. Utilizing a bivariate ordered probit modeling approach to better account for the potential correlation between unobserved factors, we simultaneously modeled the perceived risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus in case of riding transit and using ridesharing services. A wide range of factors is found to be influential on the perceived risk of using shared mobility services, including the socio-demographic attributes, built environment settings, and the virus spread. Further, our results indicate that the mitigation strategies to increase the ridership of shared mobility services should be adaptive considering the spatial variations.     

The impact of rail-based stations on passengers’ safety perceptions. A systematic review of international evidence

Feeling safe in public transport is essential for mobility, and fear of crime can be a larger problem for the individual than crime itself. The aim of the present paper is to systematically review the international evidence in rail-bound environments regarding (a) characteristics impacting safety perceptions and (b) behavioural consequences of unsafety, using the databases ScienceDirect, Scopus, PsycInfo, and Google Scholar. From a selection of 3226 publications, 52 were selected. The sample sizes range from 16 to 137 513 rail users or potential users. A social-ecological framework was adopted to categorize the findings in which place, social, individual, and temporal characteristics were identified along with short-term and long-term behavioural consequences of unsafety. Among the most important characteristics affecting passengers’ safety are lighting, surveillance, other persons’ behaviour, time of day, and one’s own gender. Future studies should further explore the complexity in interactions between characteristics connected to perceived safety.     

Coparenting Interventions for Fragile Families: What Do We Know and Where Do We Need To Go Next?

With a large and growing share of American families now forming outside of marriage, triangular infant–mother–father relationship systems in “fragile families” have begun to attract the interest of family scholars and clinicians. A relatively novel conceptualization has concerned the feasibility of intervening to support the development of a sustained and positive coparenting alliance between mothers and fathers who have not made an enduring relationship commitment to one another. At this point in time, there are very few published outcome studies of programs explicitly conceived to help build coparenting alliances in such families. This article reviews what we currently know from this evolving field of study, and from those related responsible fatherhood and marriage and relationship enhancement (MRE) initiatives that included any explicit targeting, strengthening, and assessment of fragile family coparenting in their designs. We summarize lessons learned thus far from Access and Visitation (AV) programs for non‐residential fathers, from MRE programs for low‐income, unmarried couples, and from newer programs for fragile families directly designed to target and support coparenting per se. We close with recommendations for charting this important new family process terrain.     

Sustaining and Expanding Systems of Care to Provide Mental Health Services for Children, Youth and Families Across America

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has been instrumental in supporting the development and implementation of systems of care to provide services to children and youth with serious mental health conditions and their families. Since 1993, 173 grants have been awarded to communities in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the District of Columbia, and 21 American Indian/Alaska Native communities. The system of care principles of creating comprehensive, individualized services, family-driven and youth-guided care and cultural and linguistic competence, supported by a well-trained and competent workforce, have been successful in transforming the field of children's mental health and facilitating the integration of child-serving systems. This approach has achieved positive outcomes at the child and family, practice and system levels, and numerous articles have been published using data collected from system of care communities, demonstrating the effectiveness of this framework. This article will describe lessons learned from implementing the system of care approach, and will discuss the importance of expanding and sustaining systems of care across the country.     

Primitive Drivers: Racial Science and Citizenship in the Motor Age

Lay participation in the deliberation of techno-scientific issues has become an important objective of policy making in many countries. Using the example of a series of Round Table discussions dealing with genome research allows us to analyse the ways in which the participants of this event construct their arguments during the discussion. Explaining the observed discursive strategies we focus on performative aspects of the deliberation process. In such a way it is taken into account how the setting of a given participatory process influences the ways in which participants are enrolled and enact their participation accordingly. In the analysed case, the setting was not taken as a given, but public participation and its discursive framework became itself subject to negotiation during the process. Hence, the discursive power of individual experiences and the legitimacy of personal interests as the argumentative basis were negotiated during the Round Table discussions. The participants only rarely grounded their statements in practical knowledge and individual experiences. Instead we saw them performing other discursive repertoires, e.g. drawing on societal benefits. Individual perspectives were often transcended and articulated in the form of super-individual arguments which endowed participants' statements with substantial discursive power and provided an alternative rationale for contributing to the deliberation without explicit reference to personal experiences. More broadly, the observed reluctance of the participants to speak-up for their personal interests can be seen as a result of a political culture that favours the advancement of de-individualised perspectives in public deliberation.     

The (Mis)understanding of Scientific Uncertainty? How Experts View Policy-Makers,the Media and Publics

Abstract

Frequent claims that publics ‘misunderstand’ science ignore the contested definition of scientific uncertainty itself. Scientific uncertainty means different things in the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities, while public controversies show that interpretations of scientific uncertainty have different implications for policy and decision-making. This prompts analysis of the ways that experts view scientific uncertainty and how they characterise the (mis)understandings of this uncertainty by policy-makers, media and publics. Experts from diverse academic fields define scientific uncertainty differently depending on their disciplinary background. For example, mathematics provides experts from the natural sciences with a practice language that facilitates communication with those sharing this cultural competence, but it does not suffice for engaging with wider audiences. Further, experts’ views of diverse publics come across as folk theories, in Arie Rip's terms, which, compiled from disparate pieces of information, can be used to fill a gap in the knowledge about publics.