The student presentation this week was on whether HPV vaccination should be mandated in schools. She had some great media examples of the hype around the dangers of HPV vaccination, and information on legislation to mandate HPV vaccination. Did you know that Texas was the first state that tried to require HPV vaccination along with other vaccines? That legislation didn’t pass. But Virginia and DC do have HPV vaccination requirements, and other states are attempting legislation. She presented some interesting data that women who are “decisionally neutral” about accepting HPV vaccination are unlikely to get vaccinated, suggesting that vaccination legislation could convert a number of people who are not actively opposed to vaccination.

We talked about theories and how they do (and don’t) adequately explain sexual behavior.

We talked about one of my major pet peeves – researchers who talk about gender differences in, for instance, age at first sex (boys younger than girls), number of sexual partners (boys more than girls), and condom use (boys use condoms more than girls). The math doesn’t work. Who are these boys having sex with? Most data suggests that boys’ sexual partners are younger than them, so how can they start at earlier ages than girls do? If boys are having sex with younger girls, then, if we match boys and girls on age, shouldn’t the boys actually be having fewer partners, not more? And similarly, if heterosexual boys and girls are having sex with each other, and then reporting differing rates of condom use, how is that possible? There’s a great article by Brown and Sinclair (1999) that demonstrates, by having participants discuss their strategies for estimating lifetime sexual partners, that men and women have different strategies for estimating number of sexual partners. Women are more likely to rely on enumeration (e.g., naming: Bill, Tom, Joe…) and tally retrieval (just “knowing” the number and being able to access that number). Men are more likely to use rough approximation (um, 5-10? So 10). Enumeration in particular has a tendency to lead to undercounting (e.g., if someone forgot about a particular partner). And men might have a tendency to overestimate in rough approximation (round up).

We spent a long time talking about sex education, and what ideally we would want taught, and when.

One exciting aspect of talking about my area of research in class is that the majority of articles that students brought in (independently) were either ones that I have already read, or written by people I know well (or both). This week that list included a paper by one of my collaborators, Derek Kreager that demonstrates that male adolescents with many sexual partners are more accepted by peers, whereas female adolescents with many sexual partners are less accepted by peers, demonstrating the peer context of the sexual double standard;  a paper by my former student, Sara Vasilenko, in which they demonstrated latent classes of sexual behavior;  a qualitative study with the great title, “When you got nothing to do, you do somebody”: A community’s perception of neighborhood effects on adolescent sexual behaviors; and work from Monique Ward’s research group on communication with parents and peers about sex among Asian Americans.

 Finally, we chatted about a recent article by Eric Anderson and colleagues on heterosexual men kissing men. In Britain. If you haven’t read it, you must. And then get others to read it, so you can talk about it.

I had a million more things to say about sexual health in adolescence, but alas, we must move on to new topics next week.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Sex first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on April 29, 2014.”

You know it’s an interesting class when someone announces “I have an orgasm question.” And we’re not even getting to sex until next week.

We spent a long time talking about the measurement of romantic relationships. In particular, how to measure some ideal grouping variable to distinguish those in romantic relationships from those not.  One of the papers we read, by Meier and Allen (2009) used Add Health data and these 2 inclusion criteria: whether the participant reported a “special romantic relationship” in the past 18 months, OR, if there was one person with whom they held hands, hugged, and kissed in the past 18 months. 85% of the romantic relationship sample was identified through claiming a specific partner, and the remaining 15% through engaging in the 3 behaviors with the same person. Other suggestions that came up in class as possible relationship status indicators included time/length in relationship, behaviors engaged in with partner, asking friends/peers if the participant was in a relationship, or asking participants something like, “would your friends consider you to be in a romantic relationship?” No one really wanted to tackle the direct question of how to ask whether someone is in relationship, yes or no.

We talked about gender differences in romantic relationship behavior, which is perhaps my only excuse to play this in class. I don’t think I realized before today how perfectly the song fits into a David Buss framework of mate selection.

We talked about unreciprocated love (crushes!) based on a chapter I really like, but it is challenging to link to, by Welsh, Grello, and Harper. The perfect example for talking about crushes/unreciprocated love comes from a blog where the writer posted entries from her early adolescent diary. So awesome. You will have to scroll around to find multiple entries in the month I linked to, but it’s worth it – you’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you’ll relate, and you’ll think, wow, just like what research says!

Our student presenter discussed whether non-relationship sex has increased during adolescence, and whether it is unhealthy. She referred to some not-yet-published longitudinal data that suggest that hooking up in college has increased in the past few decades. These data suggest that rates of sexual behavior in the past year haven’t changed much since the 80’s, but that there is a slight increase between the 1988-1996 college cohort compared to the 2002-2010 college cohort in casual sex/hooking up. Specifically, among sexually active students, those in the more recent cohort were more likely to have a casual date/pickup sexual partner in the past year (44% vs. 35%) or a friend as a sexual partner (69% vs. 56%) and less likely to have a serious romantic or marital sexual partner (77% vs. 85%). Her conclusion on the second question, whether it is unhealthy, was mixed, though more likely unhealthy for girls/young women. My research group also has a paper on the short-term consequences of sex that suggests that although sex with dating partners and with non-dating partners are equally associated with positive consequences of vaginal sex, there are more negative consequences when with non-dating partners – though we did not find differences by gender.

 “The post This week in Adolescent Development: Romantic relationships first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on April 22, 2014.”

Thank goodness it was sunny outside, because we had a somewhat disheartening discussion about depression, eating disorders/problems, body image, and obesity this week.

Some of the more lively discussions we had included:

We spent a long time talking about body image, particularly for adolescent girls. The biggest discussion here was around the issue of how we protect adolescents from feeling negative about their bodies, given the culture we live in. How should parents, for instance, who want their daughters to grow up to be confident young women, approach this issue? The idea that we should focus on what the body can DO rather than what the body LOOKS like was discussed. This perspective reminded me of a blog post that was rampantly posted on facebook last summer.  On a personal note, I’ve struggled with this issue extensively as a parent. When I saw that blog post, I thought there were great points about discussing what the body can do, avoiding fat/negative self-body talk, and teaching about healthy eating but not completely avoiding treats. As a parent, I'm extremely careful about discussing dieting/weight loss, I never say anything disparaging about my own body in front of her, and I even just deal when she squeezes fat on my body and says "squishy Mama!" But a decision I came to years ago was that sometimes I SHOULD tell my daughter she's beautiful or cute or looks good or whatever. Not focusing on size or someone else's ideals, but letting her know I think she’s gorgeous. But some day (and it's there already of course), no matter what I do, she IS going to care how she looks. And if I don't tell her she's beautiful, who will? And if I don't tell her she's beautiful, but I do tell her she's smart and funny and thoughtful and strong, at some point she's going to wonder whether I think she's NOT beautiful.

Even in our household where we are extremely careful not to talk about size or weight or dieting, and are very careful about how we discuss food, I have seen how culture can impact my daughter’s perceptions. We now keep one carton of multigrain cheerios, and when we buy more, we take the bag out and put it in the old carton, because my daughter had noticed that on the back it says “People who choose more whole grain tend to weigh less than those who don’t…. more grains, less you.” Soon after she wouldn’t wear one of her winter coats because it “makes me look too big.”

So, we all got rather worked up about messages to children about weight and body size. On the other hand, there’s an obesity epidemic in the United States – do we want everyone to have positive body image, even if they are at an unhealthy weight?

We discussed drive for muscularity vs. thinness, and the fact that obesity cutoffs are generally based on BMI, which doesn’t account for muscularity vs. fat.

We discussed a couple of papers from my research group about associations between body image and sexual behavior, and how, for young men, body image increases after first intercourse, whereas for women it remains stable or slightly decreases.

And we talked about work on affluence, much of it by Suniya Luthar, suggesting that although there are benefits of being affluent, there are also costs, such as high rates of substance use and anxiety.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Internalizing behaviors and eating first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on April 14, 2014.”

For the past 4 years, I chaired the membership committee of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA). One of the areas we identified as a need for growth was in terms of advice and engagement for mid-career scholars. SRA has done a fabulous job over the past few years of improving professional development guidance for emerging scholars. Could the organization start to do the same for mid-career scholars?

The membership committee organized an invited roundtable for the 2014 SRA biannual meeting in Austin, TX. We were quite excited about the participants on the panel, as well as the turnout (given that it was late in the afternoon on the last day of the conference). The panelists gave excellent advice, and the audience asked really helpful questions. I wrote a blog post for SRA summarizing the advice from the scholars (and explaining why my first attempt at live tweeting was a huge failure). You can find the post here.

I did want to mention one thing that was not brought up by any of the panelists, and that is work/life balance. At mid-career, almost everyone has responsibility to a young child, or a teenager, or an aging parent. These are not unique features of mid-career, but often mid-career represents the time that these responsibilities converge. I remember a time in my mother's life when she had an active full time job, an aging father to visit at a residential facility, a husband with a degenerative disease, and a grandson in the NICU (she was a young grandmother). This convergence isn't uncommon at this point in one's career, and it's another way in which work/life balance can be challenging. I don't have all the answers of the perfect balance (even though, as my son likes to tell people, I won "Best work/life balancer at HDFS follies last year).

Post-tenure, it's a bit easier to think long-term. If a manuscript gets submitted one week later because your child is home with the flu or because you spend a week visiting your parent in a hospital, it doesn't feel as career threatening as it might pre-tenure (though obviously, one week is rarely career threatening for anyone).
Work-life balance also involves things like exercise, healthy eating, and time with friends. I've mentioned before that I put exercise blocks on my actual calendar because if I don't, it doesn't happen. But exercise gives me more energy and makes me a generally happier person, so it improves my work/life balance. In addition to putting it on my calendar, I work it into my daily life -- I try to walk my kids to school and then myself to the office, and this week, I started trying an exercise ball in place of my chair (yes, I get many strange looks as people walk by my office). So work/life balance is sometimes about responding to things outside your control (babies who don't sleep all night long; responsibility to a parent's finances;  partner's illness), but sometimes about finding the balance you need to be a sane and happy person.

Can you do something balanced for yourself today?

“The post Professional development advice at mid-career first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on April 9, 2014.”

Substance use is one of my favorite topics in adolescent development (insert punchline here, but only if you didn’t know me as an adolescent). This week was no exception.

Our student presenter talked about vaping, prescription drug misuse, pharm parties, and molly. We discussed increasing and decreasing trends over time for specific drugs, and differences by college vs. non-college, and country (Monitoring the Future is a great resource for substance use prevalence rates. Also, check out vast differences by country across Europe).  Here’s one example of a graph I made a couple of years ago from the ESPAD website:

We talked about theories of substance use based on Petratis, Flay, and Miller (1995), and Schulenberg and Maggs (2002). The general consensus was that no one theory was enough to explain everything, but for any empirical article we discussed, more than one theory/framework could be used to explain it.

And we talked about one of the aspects of substance use that interests me most, event specific drinking/prevention. This topic included work that shows that: (1) college students drink more at spring break, but only if they go on trips with friends; (2) if examined on a week by week basis, college students drink more during the times they’re away from school, such as, in addition to spring break, Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years (and also Guavaween); (3) Saint Patrick’s Day only causes a major change in drinking (measured as BAC) if it’s on a normally non-drinking day; if it’s  on a Thursday, it’s not that different from other Thursdays. We talked about my research group’s study on State Patty’s Day – a student constructed holiday that led to increased drinking and increased police reported offenses. And different ways to approach college student drinking. 

Finally, one student shared an article that used peer network analysis to demonstrate that even after controlling for friends’ alcohol use, friends’ parents’ knowledge/monitoring and discipline were linked to adolescents’ own alcohol use. That is, adolescents’ friends’ parents may have an influence on adolescents’ alcohol use behavior (don’t know how I feel about this finding as a parent. I used to hope that my children would have nerdy friends, but now I also have to think about the friends’ parents!). 

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Substance use first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on April 7, 2014.”