Waterman, E., & Lefkowitz, E. S. (2017). Are mothers’ and fathers’ parenting characteristics associated with emerging adults’ academic engagement? Journal of Family Issues, 38, 1239-1261.
 
Occasionally, we have a paper that is about neither sex or romantic relationships.
 
In this paper, we considered how students’ perceptions of their mothers’ and fathers’ parenting characteristics when they were growing up, and now, were associated with their academic engagement. We considered authoritative, permissive, and authoritarian parenting style when growing up, as well as current relationship quality, and measured multiple aspects of academic engagement: attitudes (importance of grades), behaviors (attendance), and performance (GPA). We found that students with more permissive mothers viewed grades as less important than other students. Men with more authoritarian mothers tended to view grades as more important, and this association was weaker for women. Women with more authoritarian mothers tended to attend class less frequently and have worse GPAs, and this association was weaker for men. Finally, men with better relationships with their fathers tended to view grades as more important, and this association was weaker for women.
 
Findings provide some support for Bronfenbrenner’s (1986) ecological systems theory, in that mothers’ parenting style and fathers’ relationship quality were associated with emerging adults’ academic engagement. Earlier parenting style and current parent–offspring relationship quality may be important not only in adolescence, when individuals live in closer proximity to their parents, but effects may continue to matter in emerging adulthood. This phenomenon appears to be stronger for academic attitudes than for academic behavior or performance. Additionally, results suggest that individuals’
characteristics, specifically gender, interact with the microsystem (Bronfenbrenner, 1986), with parenting characteristics associated in different ways for young men and young women.  
 
“How Parentings Characteristics Are Associated With College Students’ Academic Engagement first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 31, 2018.”

Our first paper written in Google Docs
 
Recently I described our paper in a special issue on relationship dissolution. Writing this paper was a completely collaborative experience, and my first time doing it this way, so I thought I’d describe how that process went for us.
 
We read a call for papers for a special issue on romantic relationship dissolution in Emerging Adulthood.  I had three doctoral students at the time, so at our research group meeting we discussed whether we had any data that might fit the special issue. The thing about special issues is that the turnaround time is generally relatively short, certainly shorter than my usual time from paper conceptualization to submission.  It would be challenging to collect data for a special issue in time to write it up, and even challenging (not impossible) to start entirely new analyses on a brand new paper.
 
If you can pull it off, though, there’s value in submitting to a special issue. First, your submission is not a shot in the dark – you know the journal is interested in the topic, so if you submit something of good quality, I believe your likelihood of acceptance is higher. Of course it depends on the submission rate, but the guest editors need a certain number of papers to fill the issue. Second, you are then grouped with similar papers, increasing the likelihood that researchers interested in the topic will stumble upon your paper.
 
In our discussion, we realized we had a conference presentation submitted on long distance dating relationships (LDDRs), and that it wouldn’t be that challenging to subsequently look at breakups in this sub-group to fit the special issue. But, given time constraints, and that all of us were in the middle of multiple other papers, we would need a highly collaborative process among the four of us.
 
I believe the process from start to finish (other than the original analyses for the conference submission, which were only part of the final analyses) was 6 months. 
 
One key feature in making this process work (for us) was that we identified a project leader. Emily had been lead author on the conference submission, and so she agreed to be project leader and first author on the manuscript. She set up timelines and tables, helped distribute tasks, ran the discussions at our group meetings, and kept us on track.
 
We had one google doc that we used for everything related to the project. It started with timelines and outlines and eventually had the fully drafted manuscript. Everyone had full rights on the doc so they could choose to write directly, or to edit/suggest.
 
Emily created timelines to keep us on track. The only one I could quickly find is this one, from the second half of the process:

We started with a lit review, divvying up the literature for different authors to summarize. I really appreciate the note that some of the reviewing is copy and pasted so needs to be reworded. Good reminder and good practice in general.

Then as each author tackled different sections, we could work on it simultaneously. I generally appreciate track changes in editing manuscripts, but one challenge is having two or more people editing simultaneously. Yes, you can merge changes, but I always find it cumbersome to receive three edited versions of the same paper and to try to merge them. In contrast, with everyone working in one google doc, there was no concern about order or turn taking. In addition, if each person was writing a separate section, they could simply write. But if they wanted to edit someone else’s text and wait on approval from the other author, they could use suggest mode.
 
Eventually, when we wanted to finalize formatting and make sure things looked pretty, we switched to a Word version and passed it along in a more traditional way. I appreciated seeing this heading at the top when I opened the original document this week:

Documentation of process is so important for continuity and I really appreciated finding this heading there.
 
Overall, I think all four of us would describe the experience as very positive. I can’t think of any negatives of doing it in google docs, besides having to fix formatting later. I don’t know that I would automatically write a manuscript I first author in google docs, simply because I’m more comfortable with MS Word. But, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again through google docs as a fully collaborative paper. My life doesn’t always have space for writing a manuscript in 6 months, but for my research group at the time, it worked, and we are pleased with the result. 
 
“Our First Paper Written in Google Docs first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 26, 2018.”

College students in long distance relationships feel worse when on campus
 
Waterman, E. A., Wesche, R., Leavitt, C. E., Jones, D. E., & Lefkowitz, E. S. (2017). Long-distance dating relationships, relationship dissolution, and college adjustment. Emerging Adulthood, 5, 268-279.
 
Did you start college with a romantic partner “back home”? Do you think that having a partner back home affected your wellbeing at school, your adjustment to college, and/or your engagement in regular college activities?
 
This paper has an interesting history on how we came about writing it – it’s the most collaborative writing process I’ve ever been involved in. But I think I’ll save those details for another post, and today, just write about the content of the paper.         
 
As part of a special issue on breakups in emerging adulthood, we considered how relationship status and daily location, as well as relationship dissolution, were associated with daily affect and behaviors. First semester college students completed daily surveys of their time use (including whether they were on or off campus, affect, activities, and alcohol use. They also reported whether they were in a romantic relationship, and whether the partner also lived in the same area. We used reports from their first two semesters of their relationship status and relationship length to determine whether they stayed together or broke up, and if they broke up, if they were in a new relationship.
 
In looking at relationship type at first semester, we found that overall, students had less positive affect and were lonelier on days they were on campus compared to other days. But more specifically, these associations only held for students in long distance dating relationships.  
 
Single students participated in university activities more frequently than students in long distance dating relationships.

In contrast, relationship dissolution was not associated with affect or behaviors. That is, students who experienced breakup of long distance dating relationships didn’t differ from those who did not on their affect, loneliness, or behaviors.
 
Overall, findings suggest that students in long distance dating relationships may have more difficulty adjusting to college life than other students. The innovation of our study over prior work is that we considered location, rather than assessing wellbeing/affect/loneliness at a general level. Thus, our findings suggest that differences in wellbeing (in this case, positive affect and loneliness) between students in LDDRs and other students exist only when they are on campus; when they are off campus they are similar to their peers. For students who started college in LDDRs, wellbeing did not subsequently differ whether they maintained or dissolved these relationships, suggesting resiliency.
 
“College Students in Long Distance Relationships Feel Worse When on Campus first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 24, 2018.”

I was a straight A (if you include A-’s) student. My last B+ was freshman year of college (that’s 9 years of straight A’s by the end of grad school). I have what I sometimes refer to as A Student Syndrome. That is, I want to be good at everything I do, and I want to do everything I think I am supposed to do. A Student syndrome led me to hurt my knee in yoga class, even though I knew it would hurt my knee. Now I tell fitness instructors on the first day that I have knee (and back) issues, so that they check in on me if they think I’m doing something I shouldn’t.
 
So, when it comes to mom-ing, I have trouble letting things go. Part of it is definitely working mom guilt. Although some people argue that most women want to stay home full time with kids, I definitely don’t have that desire. When my kids were very young, I sometimes spent weekends counting the hours until I could get back to work. I am happy to work full time (a few fewer hours would be great, though!) and I don’t think I’ve damaged my kids because of it.
 
And yet, I do at times have guilt for the things I don’t do, and that guilt can lead me into Supermom mode.  I think I have this idealization that Stay-at-home moms can be 100% engaged in their kids’ lives and do every school activity and every Pinterest-y lunchbox stuffing, birthday party planning, school-project supporting thing possible. Of course, if I truly think about it, I imagine that Stay-at-home moms have unrealistic images of what moms who work outside the home are like, too. Perhaps they picture us always in high powered business suits sitting around boardroom tables in fancy office towers having important meetings over lattes (note to Stay-at-home moms – this is SO not my life).
 
I am fortunate that I have flexibility in my job, which allows me to do some things that I couldn’t do if I had a time card type job. I got to volunteer at field day. But I do have a tendency to take those opportunities farther than needed. For instance, my kids’ middle school has two days in the Fall when you can attend classes with your kid. I have two middle schoolers, but can’t spend 2 full days at middle school. Instead, I end up spending a couple of hours each year looking at my schedule and their schedules, and figuring out how I can get to at least 1 of every category of class (and there are eight categories), and of course, equal numbers for each kid, and meeting each teacher if possible. Then I talk to other moms who just zip in and out to a couple of classes, or don’t bother going at all.
 
Adding to the guilt is that a few years ago my kids started complaining that other kids just get to hang out all summer and play videogames and go to the pool, while they have to go to camp (Build Underwater Robots and Rollercoasters Camp! Nature Camp! Cooking Camp! All kinds of awesome, expensive camps). These complaints led to our annual Mama-Camp week, which is basically a staycation. Pre-planning involves lists of everything they want to do. And so, we achieve my kids’ idealized visions of what kids who stay home all summer do, crammed into one week. Whereas as I know for a fact that kids who stay home all summer get bored, and have to do chores, and often wish they could go to cool camps like their friends whose parents work outside the home.
 
When birthday parties roll around I have a tendency to start overplanning, even as I tell myself months in advance, Don’t overplan! This tendency has led to things such as the homemade, Which Greek God is Your Parent Quiz; Snacks to correspond to each Wings of Fire dragon clan’s food preferences; Field day bingo; and the most work ever, Spy Birthday Party, which at midnight the night before had to be totally revamped to be indoors due to impending thunderstorms.
 
Logical Eva – and Eva who will listen to her head and her experience – knows that these efforts are not necessary. Basically, give kids a yard and a bag of potato chips and they are happy at a birthday party. But A Student Eva, Supermom-aspiring Eva, thinks that I must do it all, and do it all well. Last year for Pi-Day, my kid wanted to bring in a pie. Could I have bought a pie? Of course. But no, I decided to make chocolate cream pie, from scratch, even making the pudding from scratch rather than using a box. Because 5th graders really know the difference. The class ended up with 5 pies that day, and only one was homemade. Similarly, at the end of school year party, kids could bring a snack from home. I imagined the Stay-at-home moms laboring over fanciful decorated cookies, and felt guilty sending my kids in with 2 batches of homemade brownies – only to learn that every other snack was store bought, mostly Doritos.
 
Why in the world do I do this? Would my kids suffer if they showed up to school with Doritos? Would teachers or other parents think less of me? I doubt it. Logically I know it’s mostly in my head. Generally, my kids would probably rather I spend more quality time with them rather than staying up too late making something unnecessary and then too tired to be present in the moment.
 
Tell me it’s not just me, that there are other moms (parents? Do dads ever do this?) out there with similar tendencies. And if so, let’s tell each other that it’s okay to be a B-student. And it’s also okay to sometimes say no to the bake sale or send your kid to school with a bag of Doritos.              
 
“Supermom Syndrome first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 19, 2018.”

Wesche, R., Kreager, D. A., Lefkowitz, E. S., & Siennick, S. E., (2017). Early sexual initiation and mental health: A fleeting association or enduring change? Journal of Research on Adolescence, 27, 611-627.
We have several papers on whether having sex is associated with negative wellbeing.  Much of our work in this area has used college student samples, and has generally demonstrated that sex is linked, if anything, to improved wellbeing.
 
However, other evidence suggests that early sexual intercourse (before age 16) is linked to adolescent girls’ anxiety and depression.
 
In this paper, we considered within-person associations between sexual initiation and internalizing symptoms. We used annual data on internalizing symptoms from ninth grade to age 19, as well as data on sexual initiation. In addition to generally examining whether sexual initiation is linked with increased internalizing symptoms, we also examined whether this association decayed over time.
 
We replicated prior research, demonstrating that sexual initiation was associated with increases in internalizing symptoms for early initiating girls. However, we also demonstrated that the association decayed over time. By 1 year after sexual initiation, early initiating girls were similar to girls who initiated later and to girls who were not sexually active. Sexual initiation was not associated with internalizing symptoms for boys, or for girls who initiated at age 16 or older.
 
These findings suggest that, although early sexual initiation may negatively impact female adolescents’ mental health, this association fades with time. As with many other types of disruptive life events, the negative impact of early sexual initiation decreases as girls are farther removed from the event. In fact, based on other research, being sexually active may begin to confer mental health benefits for girls, if they become regularly sexually active.
 
Finally, think about the prevention implications of these findings. Although an abstinence only perspective often states that sexual initiation in adolescence is damaging to wellbeing, our findings indicate that, even for early initiating girls, having sex does not confer long term negative consequences. Scholars consistently argue for the importance of comprehensive sex education, to benefit both girls and boys, whether sexually active or not. These findings are another piece of evidence against abstinence only education, and the complexity of associations between sexual behavior and wellbeing.
 
“Early Sexual Initiation Does Not Have Long Lasting Negative Effects on Girls’ Mental Health first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 17, 2018.”

I’ve now written two posts about how to avoid embarrassing yourself when you’re presenting at a conference or job talk (or lecture, or any other presentation where you have notes in PowerPoint). That is, preparing your slides in a way so that when they are pulled up, the audience doesn’t see your speaker notes.
 
The embarrassing moment can be avoided altogether, though, on the presentation end. It is particularly important to keep this issue in mind when you are either a conference organizer/chair, or someone who invited a speaker/job candidate and is helping the speaker set up. It is relatively easy “at the podium” to avoid the embarrassing moment by thinking about how you pull up the slides.
 
So, lots of different ways to do so smoothly, depending on the context and the equipment, such as:

• The simplest way: Don’t connect the projector until you have sorted everything out (copied slides, opened file) and started the slide show.
  
• As soon as you open PowerPoint (preferably before projecting the images), close the speaker notes. That way, even if you end up leaving presentation mode at some point, the speaker notes still won’t show.
• On my laptop, I can choose Windows-P and then choose “computer only” so that until I am ready, the screen won’t show my laptop screen. This option works well if you have to have the connection up the whole time. Just remember to undo it before your presentation begins.

 
At a conference a couple of years ago, my symposium chair was paging through all of my slides to make sure they were working, but was doing so as they were projected on the large screen. As the organizer, do think about the speakers and whether they would want everyone to see all of their slides/graphs/data before they even begin presenting (general answer = no).
 
I use a similar technique when lecturing. This past Spring I had a 290 student class, with 2 very large screens. When I arrived the screens were already connected to the built in computer, and I still had to log onto the campus system, find my slides, download them, and pull them up. I’m not a morning person, so I don’t want to risk logging in live, on screen (I did occasionally enter my password in the wrong box and it did appear on my monitor, but fortunately, not the big screen).  Luckily, on the podium there was an option to black out the screens. So I would keep screens blank until I logged in and pulled up my slides just the way I wanted them, and then could project my first slide. Much better than logging in with an audience, or showing the class all of my slides at once (of course, just in case, I also didn’t have any notes on slide 1).
 
In short, don’t just protect yourself from the embarrassing moment – protect your colleagues as well.
 
“Avoid Showing Others’ Speaker Notes first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 12, 2018.”

Wesche, R., Vasilenko, S. A., & Lefkowitz, E. S. (2017). Latent classes of sexual behaviors: Prevalence, predictors, and consequences. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 14, 100-111.
 
Sexuality researchers (us included!) have increasingly acknowledged the importance of understanding how diverse patterns of sexual behaviors contribute to normative development and well-being. In this paper, we used a person centered approach, latent class analysis, to study patterns of sexual behavior from kissing to penetrative sex, and how different latent classes of behaviors, gender, and partner type predicted subsequent consequences of sexual behavior.
 
Latent class analysis revealed four classes of sexual behaviors: Kissing Only, Kissing and Touching, All Behaviors, and Oral and Penetrative Only. These groups differed in their consequences. Specifically, compared to individuals in the All Behaviors class, individuals in the Kissing Only class were less likely to experience a positive or a negative intrapersonal consequence of sexual behaviors. Men were less likely to report a negative intrapersonal consequence than women were. Participants in the All Behaviors class were less likely to experience a negative interpersonal consequence of sexual behaviors when they had a romantic partner than a nonromantic partner; this effect was not significant for the Kissing and Touching class and the Kissing Only class.

In summary, patterns characterized by all sexual behaviors were especially common among students with romantic sexual partners, and partner type differentially predicted consequences of sexual behaviors across classes. Findings underscore the need to recognize variation in consequences of sexual behaviors with both romantic and nonromantic sexual partners and to further explore the role of sexual behaviors in explaining variation in emotional health outcomes associated with nonromantic sexual
partnerships.
 
 
“Latent Classes of Sexual Behaviors first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 10, 2018.”

If you’re like me, you always feel behind on your to do lists. You always feel not productive enough.
 
After I accepted the position of Department Head at UConn, I was talking to a colleague who knows me pretty well – he was Professor-in-Charge (PIC) of the Undergraduate Program while I was PIC of the Graduate Program at Penn State. And leading up to that, we had been colleagues for about 15 years. His biggest advice to me was not to go into the new job/department and Eva them (he didn’t put it in those words). That is, he advised me to slow roll my tasks – spend time in the first year listening to people, making lists of things I wanted to do, and making a 5-year plan to get them done, and do only a fraction (1/5 perhaps?) of those items in Year 1. He also told me that I had accomplished more in my two years as Grad PIC than most before me had accomplished in their full 5-year terms.
 
The latter part surprised me – I told him that in fact, I was leaving many things unfinished and felt that there were so many things I wanted to accomplish as Grad PIC that were not yet done.
 
And then he explained to me the numerator/denominator problem – which, honestly, I don’t know if he made up or had learned elsewhere. But it resonated with me.
 
The idea is that we often think of our productivity based on the denominator – all of the things we want to get done, whether completed or not. But when others consider our productivity, they usually focus on the numerator – all of the things we actually have accomplished. So, if we could focus more on our own accomplishments, rather than on what we want to accomplish but haven’t yet, we would feel better about ourselves.
 
Something similar happened after my first year as department head, when my new colleagues said they were appreciative of all I had completed in my first year, whereas I honestly felt I had barely touched the tip of the iceberg. Again, numerator/denominator.
 
I think that part of the problem is the way we approach tasks. For instance, I use outlook to organize my tasks. Once I complete a task, I have the satisfaction of marking it done in Outlook. But, I don’t then get to look at it my completed tasks regularly. Instead, what I see on a daily basis is all of the tasks I have to do – tasks, for instance, where I didn’t make the deadline so I have to change the deadline to a future date, or tasks that are upcoming. Here’s mine (I’ve removed the specific items):

It may be that my google spreadsheet of other people’s work in part appeals to me because I can see all of the past work highlighted in green. So, I actually DO regularly get to see the completed part of the denominator when I look at what is upcoming.
 
I’ve thought about this issue recently in my return to blogging, because I have been trying to blog all of my research group’s published papers in the past 3 years (2016 – current). Day to day, I think about the R&R I still have to finish, the former student’s manuscript that’s in my inbox to read, or the paper idea I haven’t made much progress on.  But blogging about recently published papers has been a great reminder of all of the publications in my numerator – I feel as though I’ve written many blog posts on papers, but I’m still working on 2016 papers. A quick skimming of my CV tells me that we have 17 published or in press papers and chapters since 2016. I’m pretty satisfied with that numerator, even if there is a lot remaining in the denominator and in my inbox.
 
I am not sure the most effective way to remind ourselves of our productivity, or all of the things we HAVE accomplished recently. As I mentioned, looking at my CV recently helped me. It also helps me when I have to write an annual report to our Dean about the department’s accomplishments and what I did over the past year. But those big ticket items also fail to capture all of the day-to-day minutiae we accomplish. So, I recommend you figure out a way to remind yourself of your numerator regularly. Yes, we have to focus on the tasks to come, but it can be helpful to remind ourselves of all we have done already.
 
“The Numerator/Denominator Problem of Productivity first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 5, 2018.”

Kreager, D. A., Staff, J., Gauthier, R., Lefkowitz, E. S., & Feinberg, M. E. (2016). The double standard at sexual debut: Gender, sexual behavior and adolescent peer acceptance. Sex Roles, 75, 377-392.  

A few weeks ago I described our recent paper that examined when college students do and don’t invoke the sexual double standard to make judgments about people’s motivations for sex. Today I’m writing about another sexual double standard paper with a younger (11 – 16 years old) sample and focused on sexual behavior and peer acceptance. In this study, we used a longitudinal network measure of received friendship nominations to examine changes in peer acceptance based on sexual behavior.
 
In this paper, we demonstrated that, consistent with a traditional sexual double standard, female adolescents who reported having vaginal sex had decreased peer acceptance over time. In contrast, male adolescents who reported having vaginal sex had increased peer acceptance over time. However, these findings did not hold across all sexual behaviors. For instance, the findings for making out showed a reverse double standard. Female adolescents who reported making out (after controlling for sex) had increased peer acceptance over time, whereas male adolescents who reported making out (again, after controlling for having sex) had decreased peer acceptance over time.
 
Thus, findings support a continued sexual double standard among adolescents. Female adolescents can demonstrate their desirability and promote their popularity to male adolescents by engaging in “light” sexual behaviors, but female adolescents who engage in intercourse risk harming their reputation/peer acceptance. In contrast, male adolescents can display their masculinity by engaging in intercourse, whereas light sexual behaviors do not enhance their acceptance. Overall results suggest that in adolescence, the sexual double standard continues to dictate the implications of sexual behavior for adolescents’ peer relationships.
 
“The Sexual Double Standard Lives: How Adolescents’ Sexual Behavior Predicts Their Peer Acceptance first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 3, 2018.”