This week we discussed some aspects of larger family context, including cultural factors, divorce/remarriage, and sibling relationships. A student provided an excellent presentation on whether divorce harms children, covering a range of perspectives, and drawing heavily on Amato’s 2010 review paper.

The student-initiated article that generated the most discussion was by Gartrell, Bos, and Goldberg (2011), demonstrating that adolescents raised in a lesbian parent household do not substantially differ from adolescents in matched households, except that these young women are substantially more likely to report being bisexual. These findings led to discussion about how to measure such differences, and whether new laws about same-sex marriage might change both the effects of having same-sex parents, and research on the topic.

Another interesting student-initiated article was by Natsuaki, Ge, Reiss, & Neiderhiser (2009). The authors aimed to examine causes of sibling similarity in aggression, recognizing that past research has pointed to genetic similarity and shared environment. In support of the deviancy training hypothesis, they demonstrated that exposure to sibling aggression at one point in time predicted more externalizing problems at a subsequent time point.

In general, students were excited to talk about sibling research, I believe at least in part because they have had less exposure to it than to parent-child research.

Although we didn’t end up discussing it, a third student-initiated article that interested me was by Spence, Henderson, and Elder (2013) examined the effects of family structure on military enlistment, demonstrating that living with a stepparent doubled the odds of military enlistment, even after controlling for other potential confounds.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Family context first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 25, 2014.”

This week we discussed parent-child interactions. A student provided a really interesting presentation on helicopter parenting. I had a student present on this topic 3 years ago, and in that short time, empirical work has flourished and measures specific to helicopter parenting have been developed. The student provided a number of popular press references to helicopter parenting, discussed theoretical underpinnings of helicopter parenting (e.g., Baumrind’s parenting style, parental control), and presented some recent measures and findings on the topic, such as Padilla-Walker and Nelson’s (2012) recent measure, and findings by Fingerman and colleagues (2012).  And, he ended with some humor.

I always like talking about Judith Harris, the self-described “terrible grandmother from New Jersey” and the stir she caused in the 90’s over whether parents contribute to children’s development beyond their genetic contribution. If you haven’t, I highly recommend reading her debate with Jerry Kagan in Slate. 

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Parent-child interactions first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 17, 2014.”

I’m feeling particularly sensitive to hyperbole after days of listening to reports of snowmageddon/snowpocalypse, and also worry about the 18 students trying to fly/drive/bus to our prospective graduate weekend right now. In addition, there is a food blog I enjoy reading, but I’ve discovered over time that each of her posts is so hyperbolic, it is difficult to take her recommendation seriously. Every recipe she provides is the most delicious/amazing/it-will-change-your-life recipe. Now when she posts a new recipe, my enthusiasm is dampened, because they can’t ALL be the best way ever known to prepare chicken.

That said, I do think that if you are not already writing introductions the way I’m about to describe, it may actually change your life.

There is a tendency when writing an introduction to write about past research in a list. I see it in undergraduate papers, master’s theses, dissertations, manuscripts I review, and yes, published articles. It is not necessarily incorrect, nor is it terrible writing. However, it is another area where you can move to intentional writing, working harder as the author to make the reading easier for others. It is easier to write a list of past research, but it is easier to read a summary of past work that integrates across studies. Undergraduate students are more likely to have one paragraph or so per study, and writers with more experience tend to have a sentence or so per study. The sentences are often linked with phrases like “similarly,” “in contrast,” or “other work has also found.” But nevertheless, the writer leaves the work of drawing connections to the reader. When a writer does the integrative work for the reader, the reader can quickly arrive at the big picture of past work, and see how it relates to the authors’ own ideas.

Here’s an example. In this paper, I could list past work as follows:

College students are more likely to drink, and drink more heavily, on their 21st birthday compared to other days (Smith, Bogle, Talbott, Grant, & Castillo, 2006). Rutledge, Park, and Sher (2008), in a more representative study, found similar increases in drinking on 21st birthdays. Neal and Fromme (2007) found that alcohol use was elevated on holidays like New Year’s Eve, as well as on football weekends. Similarly, Del Boca, Darkes, Greenbaum, and Goldman (2004) found that alcohol use increases on New Year’s Eve and other holidays. Other researchers have also found elevated rates of drinking on Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day (Glindemann, Wiegand, & Geller, 2007). Another event with higher rates of drinking is Spring Break (Patrick, Morgan, Maggs, & Lefkowitz, 2011). Grekin, Sher, and Krull (2007) found that increased drinking during Spring break occurred only when students were with friends.

I find that paragraph really challenging to process, because the connections are rarely drawn for the reader. In contrast, here is the start of our paper as actually published (Lefkowitz, Patrick, Morgan, Bezemer, & Vasilenko, 2012):

College student alcohol use is known to increase during the celebration of special events such as 21st birthdays (Rutledge, Park, & Sher, 2008; Smith, Bogle, Talbott, Grant, & Castillo, 2006), football games (Neal & Fromme, 2007b), Spring Break (Grekin, Sher, & Krull, 2007; Patrick, Morgan, Maggs, & Lefkowitz, 2011), and holidays like Halloween and New Year’s Eve (Del Boca, Darkes, Greenbaum, & Goldman, 2004; Glindemann, Wiegand, & Geller, 2007).  

In the latter example, we have summarized across studies, integrating studies that have similar findings.

I’m not comfortable highlighting any examples of published work that is not well integrated, but if you look at 10 articles you have recently read, I guarantee you will find several that list rather than integrate. And here’s another example of well integrated writing, from Dalton and Galambos (2009):

Moving away from parents is a major task of the transition to adulthood. Although some studies have indicated an association of leaving home with less depression and better relations with parents during the transition to adulthood (Aseltine & Gore, 1993; Smetana, Metzger, & Campione-Barr, 2004), others have found that living away from parents was related to a significantly higher risk of binge eating (Barker & Galambos, 2007), more depression (Galambos & Krahn, 2008; Seiffge-Krenke, 2006), and higher alcohol use (Kuo et al., 2002). In any case, living away from parents creates opportunities to engage in sexual activities due to freedom from parental detection.

In this example, I particularly appreciate the way they have set up the “some studies have found X, whereas other studies have found Y” in an integrated way.

We recently discussed this writing issue in my graduate seminar. Some students expressed concern that when they summarize and integrate, they may misrepresent, or at a minimum, miss the nuances, of past research. Of course, you should never misrepresent someone else’s work, or selectively omit things that contradict your argument. However, it is okay if you don’t provide every detail of their work. If someone found that peer rejection was associated with anxiety, depression, and substance use, but your paper focuses on substance use, you don’t need to mention anxiety and depression.

There are other benefits to moving toward more integrated writing. You will find that you have a much better sense of past work when you force yourself to summarize rather than list. In addition, integrated writing often means fewer words, and who doesn’t want that?

“The post Writing an introduction: Integrate, don’t list, past research first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 13, 2014.”

This week we had an excellent “contemporary issue” presentation by a student on whether being a sexual minority is easier on youth now compared to 20 years ago. He drew a fair bit on Savin-Williams’ book The new gay teenager. In support of the “Being easier” side he talked about changes in acceptance, role models, LGBT rights, and school organizations (e.g., Poteat et al., 2012). But he also talked about challenges, including mental health, physical health, safety, and homelessness.  Finally, he discussed how the experience of being LGBT in the U.S. currently depends on a number of individual and contextual factors, including type of sexual identity (e.g., lesbian, gay, bi, trans); intersectionality of multiple identities (e.g., ethnicity/race, religion), measurement, family, and school. The presentation spurred really interesting discussion.

The paper that we had the most discussion about this week was by Yost and McCarthy (2012). We discussed the prevalence of young heterosexual women kissing other women, the extent to which it is exploration versus sexual self-objectification, and what the increased prevalence of same-sex kissing between heterosexual women means for lesbian women’s sexual identity development.

I received an email alert about the special section of Child Development on ethnic/racial identity development in adolescence and young adulthood about 36 hours before class met. It was an interesting challenge to try to cram 4 new conceptual/review/meta-analysis articles into my usual prep time, but made me feel very up-to-date. We spent a fair bit of class time discussing the difference between ethnic identity and racial identity, and also discussing group specific measures vs. general measures like Phinney’s MEIM.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Ethnic/Racial and Sexual Identity first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 12, 2014.”

I’d say that the readings for the week on identity, and later in the semester, cognition, are the ones that give the students (and admittedly, me) the most trouble. Identity is such a philosophical and hard to capture construct that some of the writing in this area can be challenging. That said, it’s also a topic that gets students engaged in talking about broad developmental issues. The articles that generated the most discussion last week:

1. Arnett (2000). Google scholar stats give this paper over 4000 citations. I assign this paper in all of my undergraduate and graduate adolescent and lifespan courses. Students all enjoy reading this paper, whether they love the paper itself. I always admire scholars who are willing to put themselves out there with large-scale conceptual ideas, even if not everyone agrees with them.

2.  Klimstra, Luyckx, Hale, Frijns, van Lier, & Meeus (2010). We spent a lot of time in class discussing how to differentiate exploration in breadth from reconsideration, and given that identity is often thought of as a higher order/global construct, people also were interested in the idea that there could be daily fluctuations in commitment and reconsideration.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Identity first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 3, 2014.”