Severe Violence During Adolescence and Early Adulthood and Its Relation to Anticipated Rewards and Costs

This report compares the effects (concurrent and lagged) of the anticipated rewards and costs of violent crime on engagement in severe violence in a sample of male juvenile offenders (N = 1,170; 42.1% black, 34.0% Hispanic, 19.2% white, and 4.6% other; ages 14–18 at baseline). Anticipated rewards (social approval, thrill) are more predictive of concurrent severe violence than are anticipated costs (social disapproval, risk of punishment). The analysis finds no evidence that perceptions of the rewards and costs of violent crime influence engagement in severe violence 6 months later. The results support the view that adolescence is a time of heightened reward salience but raise doubt about the longitudinal predictive validity of perceptions about crime during this time of life.     

Designing Reading Comprehension Assessments for Reading Interventions: How a Theoretically Motivated Assessment Can Serve as an Outcome Measure

When designing a reading intervention, researchers and educators face a number of challenges related to the focus, intensity, and duration of the intervention. In this paper, we argue there is another fundamental challenge—the nature of the reading outcome measures used to evaluate the intervention. Many interventions fail to demonstrate significant improvements on standardized measures of reading comprehension. Although there are a number of reasons to explain this phenomenon, an important one to consider is misalignment between the nature of the outcome assessment and the targets of the intervention. In this study, we present data on three theoretically driven summative reading assessments that were developed in consultation with a research and evaluation team conducting an intervention study. The reading intervention, Reading Apprenticeship, involved instructing teachers to use disciplinary strategies in three domains: literature, history, and science. Factor analyses and other psychometric analyses on data from over 12,000 high school students revealed the assessments had adequate reliability, moderate correlations with state reading test scores and measures of background knowledge, a large general reading factor, and some preliminary evidence for separate, smaller factors specific to each form. In this paper, we describe the empirical work that motivated the assessments, the aims of the intervention, and the process used to develop the new assessments. Implications for intervention and assessment are discussed.     

The vicissitudes of autonomy in early adolescence

A sample of 865 10-16-year-olds from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds completed a questionnaire battery concerning 3 aspects of autonomy: emotional autonomy in relationship with parents, resistance to peer pressure, and the subjective sense of self-reliance. The observed patterns of relations among the measures cast doubt on the notion that autonomy is a unidimensional trait manifested similarly across a variety of situations. For most boys and girls, the transition from childhood into adolescence is marked more by a trading of dependency on parents for dependency on peers, rather than straightforward and unidimensional growth in autonomy. Moreover, contrary to long-standing notions about the greater salience of autonomy to adolescent males than to females, girls score higher than boys on all 3 measures of autonomy at all age levels.     

Are researchers bound by child abuse reporting laws?

OBJECTIVE: To discuss issues concerning mandatory reporting of child abuse in research settings. METHOD: An overview of existing Federal and State statutes regarding mandatory reporting of child abuse is presented. A critical review of the literature addresses the following issues: (1) whether researchers have a moral duty to place the health and safety of children above concerns about confidentiality and the benefits of obtaining new knowledge; (2) whether the Certificate of Confidentiality preempts reporting requirements; (3) whether researchers who are not health professionals (such as child developmentalists, psychobiologists, neuroscientists) should be required to report; and (4) whether researchers should be required to expand their protocols to include more in-depth investigation of potential abuse. RESULTS: Existing child abuse reporting laws do not specifically designate researchers as among the category of individuals mandated to report suspected child abuse. Currently, Human Subject Protection Committees and Federal funding agencies are tending to interpret reporting laws as applying to researchers, including requiring that research subjects are informed of this responsibility in consenting procedures. It is unclear whether the Certificate of Confidentiality preempts child abuse reporting laws. CONCLUSION: The authors recommend that legislatures specifically designate researchers as mandated reporters to ensure more uniform reporting practices in research settings. For both investigators and Human Subject Protection Committees, inclusion of researchers among the categories of those mandated to report would also help address issues of immunity from civil and criminal liability for "good faith" reports that turn out to be false and injurious.     

The role of context in the development of psychopathology: a conceptual framework and some speculative propositions

Despite the explosion of studies assessing relations between various contextual factors and various forms of psychological disturbance, about the only firm conclusion one can draw regarding the environment's role in the development of psychopathology is that bad things have bad effects among some-but not all-people, some-but not all-of the time. We argue that extant research has confused two different roles of context and suggest that (1) environmental factors act as nonspecific stressors in the elicitation of psychopathology by provoking autonomic arousal, with specificity of expressed psychopathology governed by individual differences in endogenous factors; and that (2) context is specific in affecting the course of psychopathology by influencing the extent to which the behavioral, affective, or cognitive components of the pathology are repeated.