See last year’s discussion of cognition and schools here.

A student presented on the following question: Should knowledge of brain development inform decisions about legal ages and/or public policy? She gave an overview of brain development in adolescence and the impact of pubertal changes on behavior. Then she discussed several topics such as whether the drinking age should be lowered (see this interesting debate in the NY Times); hot vs. cold cognition, and some of the papers by Steinberg on specific court cases and public policy; the role of peer influence, including work by Chein and colleagues; and the policy of graduated driver licensing programs.

We talked about the ways in which classrooms and schools do or do not match adolescents’ developmental stage, including both classic and recent work by Eccles and colleagues.

Next year I think I want to pull in homeschooling research. If you know of interesting research in this area, let me know.

“The post Last semester in Adolescent Development: Cognition & schools 2 first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 22, 2015.”

Extensive works considers the negative physical and mental health correlates of sexual behavior during adolescence, but less work considers the potential positive role that sexual behavior plays. By the college years, when engagement in sexual behavior is relatively normative, sexual behavior may be associated with positive wellbeing, much as it is in adulthood. In a recently published paper,  Megan Maas and I examined how sexual esteem relates to sexual behavior in the University Life Study. We found that sexual esteem was higher for students who had oral sex more frequently, had more oral and penetrative sex partners in the past 3 months, and had spent more semesters during college in romantic relationships, than for their counterparts. There were some interactions with gender. For instance, the association between sexual esteem and number of penetrative sexual partners was stronger for male than for female students.

In addition, male students who never used contraception tended to have higher sexual esteem, whereas female students who never used contraception tended to have lower sexual esteem, compared to students who used contraception.

These results are cross-sectional, so we cannot know whether having better sexual esteem is associated with engaging in more sexual behaviors, or whether engaging in more sexual behaviors leads to better sexual esteem. However, the results do demonstrate that unmarried sexual behavior after high school is linked with positive wellbeing. On the other hand, results also suggests that men with better sexual esteem might engage in riskier behavior, whereas women with better sexual esteem might be more likely to protect themselves, mirroring earlier findings Meghan Gillen, Cindy Shearer, and I had with body image.

I’m excited that more and more researchers are now approaching the study of adolescent and young adult sexuality from a normative, developmental perspective rather than consistently using a risk frame. Adolescents and young adults do engage in risky sexual behaviors, of course, but we need to understand risky behaviors in light of the positive contributions that sexual behavior provides to wellbeing.

“College students’ sexual behaviors are associated with better sexual esteem” first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 12.

We talked about crowds, based on readings on the topic (see last year’s summary). My students generally felt like the concept of crowds doesn’t translate that well to contemporary adolescents, and that adolescents’ experiences are more flexible and fluid. What do others think?

We discussed some recent research by Besic et al. (2009) that examined whether certain radical peer groups, like Goths and Aesthetics (music, drama, & art high school track, “startling appearance”) are effective defense mechanisms for dealing with inhibition/shyness. Besic and colleagues concluded that adopting the physical appearance of such a radical crowd was not effective, as these adolescents, even when matched to adolescents from other groups on inhibition, were higher in depression and lower in self-esteem.

Luckily one of my students this semester uses social network analysis so he could answer detailed questions from classmates about it.

We discussed a recent paper by de Castro et al. (2015) that argues for the value of using experimental designs in peer research to disentangle selection and socialization. They present some interesting examples from an online game, Survivor, in which they can manipulate the features of peers and whether the peers are rejecting or not.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development:  Peers 2 first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 8, 2015.”

Our last class of the semester. They were a great and engaged group and I will miss meeting with them.

Our student presenter talked about The Forgotten Half and what we now know. She shared this rap about the forgotten half. She discussed improvements over the past couple of decades, but also evidence that there are still major challenges for non-college bound youth, and particularly for undocumented immigrants, who may not have the choice to go to college in the United States.

We talked about the transition to adulthood in different cultures, in particular Italy, Sweden, and Germany based on this paper by Cook and Furstenberg (2002).

We talked about the transition to marriage, and whether women over 40 really are more likely to get shot by a terrorist than married (short answer: No; longer answer: see Rose [2005]).

And we talked about the gender gap in income and in STEM careers. Did you know that women outnumber men now in number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in Science & Engineering (S&E)?

But men still outnumber women in S&E doctoral degrees, and the disparity increases as you go along the pipeline all the way up to full professors. The controversy over statements made by Lawrence Summers when he was president at Harvard, and how accurate (as opposed to prudent) his statement was.

We discussed immigration and the fact that 2012/2013 was the first birth cohort where 0-1 year olds from ethnic minority groups outnumber those from European American backgrounds.

We discussed fertility rates by country, concerns about declining fertility rates in much of Europe, and the silly but entertaining Do it for Denmark campaign.

This year, for only the second time ever, one of my students opted to create a website rather than submit a traditional final paper. Check it out here.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Transition to adulthood first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 5, 2014.”

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.”

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.”