Political socialization in the family and young people's educational achievement and ambition

Using data from a large‐scale survey of Norwegian youth, the study examines the relationships that the performance in key academic subjects and aiming for higher education have with political socialization at home. The more often adolescents aged 13–16 talk with parents about politics and social issues, the better their performance is and the more often they aim for higher education. These relationships survive controls for, inter alia, parental level of education and other socio‐economic status indicators. The findings fit longstanding ideals in the philosophy of education. It is argued that a widened concept of ‘home background’ is needed in the sociology of education.     

Negative caregiver strategies and psychopathology in urban,African-American young adults

OBJECTIVE: There were three aims: (1). assess the prevalence of reported exposure to negative caregiver strategies in a community-based African-American population, (2). examine the sources of variation in caregiver parenting strategies, including demographic variables and child characteristics, (3). investigate whether mental disorders in young adulthood may differ based on reported degree of exposure to negative strategies. METHOD: The participants were 1197 African-Americans involved in a 1999-2001 young adult follow-up (age M=19.6, SD=.6) of an evaluation of school-based interventions in the Baltimore, MD metropolitan area. Measures included teacher-report of child aggression in first grade, parent-report of demographic variables in first and sixth grade, and young adult self-report of symptomatology, suicidal behaviors, and childhood caregiver discipline strategies. RESULTS: Fifty-four percent of the sample reported some use of physical discipline by caregivers. Lower family income and younger caregiver age, as well as teacher reports of child aggression, were related to reports of caregiver's high use of negative strategies. In addition, young adults who reported a high rate of negative caregiver strategies had a significantly increased risk for psychopathology and were over twice as likely to have experienced a history of suicidal ideation than those reporting low exposure.CONCLUSIONS: The results demonstrate the importance of examining variation in this population, with the poorest and the youngest using negative parenting strategies more frequently. In addition, the present study replicated previous findings of the link between negative caregiver discipline strategies and psychopathology. This association appears robust across diverse populations. The implications for preventive interventions are discussed.     

Economic stress, parenting, and child adjustment in Mexican American and European American families

To assess the impact of economic hardship on 111 European American and 167 Mexican American families and their 5th-grade (M age=11.4 years) children, a family stress model was evaluated. Structural equation analyses revealed that economic hardship was linked to indexes of economic pressure that were related to depressive symptoms for mothers and fathers of both ethnicities. Depressive symptoms were linked to marital problems and hostile parenting. Paternal hostile parenting was related to child adjustment problems for European Americans, whereas marital problems were linked to child adjustment problems for Mexican Americans. Maternal acculturation was associated with both higher marital problems and lower hostile parenting. The utility of the model for describing the effects of economic hardship in Mexican Americans is noted.     

Cross-lagged relationships between person-based resources,self-perceptions,and career and life satisfaction in young adults

We tested the across-time relationships between the person-based resources of assimilation (or goal pursuit) and accommodation (or goal adjustment) and two well-being outcomes (satisfaction with career progress and life satisfaction), and assessed if these relationships were mediated by self-perceptions (perceived goal attainability and optimism). Participants were 204 young adults (79 % female; M _age 26 years), who were surveyed twice, 6 months apart. Consistent with the dual-process framework for goal management, assimilation was associated with more positive self-perceptions (attainability and optimism) and higher subsequent satisfaction with career progress and life satisfaction. Perceived goal attainability mediated between assimilation and the two satisfaction outcomes. Accommodation was associated with higher subsequent life satisfaction only. Thus, both assimilation and accommodation were related to better life satisfaction in young adults, but assimilation was more adaptive in the career domain.     

Picture preferences of children and young adults

The authors offer definitions of six types of illustrations and report a study of student preference for those picture styles. Generally, their subjects, 380 students in grades K, 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, and 11, preferred photographs, with realistic drawings ranked second. But there were significant differences between sexes and age groups. This study was supported by the Faculty-In-Aid Program of Virginia Commonwealth University. Statistical advice was given by David F. Bauer.     

From hitting and tattling to communication and negotiation: The young child's stages of socialization

The importance of supporting the young child's socialization process is presented from the perspecitive of a teacher educator/researcher, a parent, and a caregiver. The article describes four stages of socialization and offers recommendations for corresponding spacial needs, play levels, adult's role, group size, and activities/materials for each stage.     

Research output,socialization, and the biglan model

This study first presents a test of the Biglan model of faculty subcultures using measures of research output and then tests the model controlling for the effects of faculty socialization. Developed in 1973, the Biglan model categorizes academic subject areas into three dimensions: hard-soft, pure-applied, and life-nonlife. Although the model has been empirically validated seven times, only the present test using data from the 1977 Ladd and Lipset (1978) Survey of the American Professoriate examines the concept of socialization as an explanation for the differences among the groups. Using discriminant analyses, the Biglan model is found to be valid: the faculty in the hard area differed from the soft, the pure from the applied, and the life from the nonlife in terms of research output. In addition, the distinctiveness of the Biglan groups appear to increase with the socialization of faculty into subject areas. These results indicate that the model may be generalized to research and doctoral-granting institutions and that the concept of socialization warrants further examination as an explanation of differences among the Biglan groups.     

资本逻辑与欧洲经济一体化

马克思虽然没有对欧洲经济一体化做过专门的论述,但由资本运动所导致的全球经济一体化早已被马克思所预见。从马克思经济学视角来审视欧洲经济一体化的进程发现,欧洲经济一体化的进程本质是资本为扩展实力范围和获取超额利润而不断改变自身形式的进程;资本运动的逻辑决定着这一进程的起点和终点,也决定着欧洲经济一体化固有的制度缺陷和发展进程。在这一进程中,资本在强制为自己开辟活动空间的同时,又进一步加剧了资本主义社会的各种矛盾,由此给欧洲经济一体化的发展带来了诸多困难。随着这一进程的不断推进,资本主义将不断逼近自身的发展极限,从而为新的社会形态出现准备了坚实的物质基础和日益成熟的社会条件。     

Attention performance in young adults with learning disabilities

Attention acts as the mind's “gatekeeper” by regulating and prioritizing the stimuli processed by the central nervous system. It is essential for cognitive performance, memory, and behavior, and we know that even slight deficiencies in attention compromise learning. Basic neuroscience research further indicates that attention consists of (fairly) independent subcomponents, which rely on distinct neural structures, and serve different functions in everyday behavior. Disturbances of brain function, such as those suggested to be related to learning disabilities, may lead to different patterns of attention performance (i.e., some attention systems may work sufficiently well, while others are substantially impaired). The present experiment describes a pilot study that aimed to characterize the extent and range of individual variations in attention performance in persons classified as learning disabled. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that attention is not uniformly impaired in these individuals. Rather, we expected some subcomponents to be more severely impaired than others, and substantial heterogeneity in the individual “deficit patterns.”The Test of Everyday Attention (TEA) was used to assess visual selective attention, attentional switching, sustained attention, and auditory–verbal working memory in students with nondyslexic learning disability (LD group) and matched controls. The group comparison revealed a significantly weaker performance in the LD group. Analysis of subtest-specific scaled scores further indicated great individual differences in the performance pattern. Thus, in each student with LD, we found normal performance in at least two subtests, while other subcomponents where severely impaired. The study supports the idea of differential attention deficits in the learning disabled, and suggests individual patterns of “strengths and weaknesses.” Taking the relationship of attention and learning into account, this finding is important with respect to the design of individual learning programs and the teaching techniques chosen for the acquisition of skills and knowledge.     

Sentence comprehension in young adults with developmental dyslexia

This study investigated the effects of syntactic complexity on written sentence comprehension in compensated adults with dyslexia. Because working memory (WM) plays a key role in processing complex sentences, and individuals with dyslexia often demonstrate persistent deficits in WM, we hypothesized that individuals with dyslexia would perform more poorly on tasks designed to assess the comprehension of syntactic structures that are especially taxing on WM (e.g., passives, sentences with relative clauses). Compared to their nondyslexic peers, individuals with dyslexia were significantly less accurate and marginally slower on passive sentences. For sentences containing relative clauses, the dyslexic group was also less accurate but did not differ in response times. Covarying WM and word reading in both analyses eliminated group differences showing that syntactic deficits in adults with dyslexia are constrained by both WM and word-reading ability. These findings support previous research showing that syntactic processing deficits are characteristic of dyslexia, even among high-achieving students.     

Educational policies and social inequality in well-being among young adults

Inequalities in health and well-being are important contemporary public health issues. This article is the first to investigate the institutional causes of inequality in well-being among youth in a comparative perspective. Data from the European Social Survey are used to analyse how educational policies moderate the association between social background and well-being. Multilevel techniques are used to investigate cross-level interactions between social background and educational policies on life satisfaction. Four indicators of inclusive educational policies are analysed: age of tracking, costs of education, enrolment rates, and second-chance opportunities in the educational system. The results show that educational policies indeed moderate the association between social background and well-being: inequalities as measured by the father’s social class are smaller in countries where educational policies are more inclusive. Moreover, the analysis shows that the moderating impact of education policies is mediated by individual-level education, activity status, and income.     

Language socialization in theory and practice

Language socialization research has traditionally focused on how young children are socialized into the norms and patterns of their culture by and through language. Research in this tradition has typically conceived of the process as relatively static, bounded and relatively unidirectional. This article, based on a long‐term ethnographic investigation of home language practices in Mexican‐background families in the United States, confirms the theoretical and applied limitations of such a traditional approach to language acquisition. Two narratives of Mexican‐background women in northern California, whose lives represent different circumstances and trajectories, show that language socialization is a dynamic and interactive process that extends throughout the lifespan as people come to participate in new communities, define and redefine themselves according to new roles, and either acquiesce in or challenge the definitions and role relationships formulated by others.     

Relationships between perceived parental acceptance-rejection, psychological adjustment, and substance abuse among young adults.

This study examined the relationship between perceived parental acceptance-rejection, psychological adjustment, and substance abuse. A volunteer sample of 40 young adult substance abusers was compared to a comparable volunteer sample of 40 nonabusers with respect to individuals' perceptions of paternal and maternal acceptance-rejection and psychological adjustment. Discriminant function analysis using the jackknife procedure was utilized to examine the predictive power and the classification accuracy of perceived parental acceptance-rejection and psychological adjustment. Results of the research show that: (a) Both perceived paternal and maternal rejection in childhood tend to be significantly higher among substance abusers than among nonabusers, and; (b) substance abusers are more impaired in their current psychological adjustment than are nonabusers. These two classes of predictor variables yield a correlation of .77 with group membership (i.e., abusers vs. nonabusers), and the three predictor variables successfully discriminate substance abusers from nonabusers with jackknifed classification accuracy of 87.5%. Adding the demographic variable "education level" to the model raises the jackknifed classification accuracy to 91.2%, yielding only seven misclassifications in the total sample of 80 volunteers.