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.”

To talk about personal fable/optimistic bias, I like to show some data I collected from a large undergraduate class a few years ago. I asked them to compare their likelihood of a range of outcomes to the rest of the class (5 point scale ranging from more likely to less likely). If people were accurate, then the same percent of students should choose more likely as less likely (you can ignore the “equal” ratings). Instead, there is almost always optimistic bias. For instance, averaged across the negative events, 47% of students rate them as less likely to happen to themselves, and only 19% as more likely (biggest biases come from STDs, pregnancy, and alcohol poisoning; reverse, pessimistic bias comes from skin cancer). Averaged across positive events, 41% of students rate them as more likely to happen to themselves, 19% as less likely (biggest biases come from successful marriage and getting the job you want; reverse pessimistic bias from winning the lottery). It’s interesting for thinking about people’s ability to make these judgments, which we now know doesn’t disappear after adolescence.

We chatted about Moffitt’s adolescence limited and life course persistent antisocial behavior model, and the newer Loeber and Burke model of different developmental pathways to externalizing and internalizing outcomes. And recent work by Loeber and colleagues on how cognitive impulsivity and intelligence are associated with the age-crime curve.

We also discussed an article in which the authors predicted age 15 externalizing behavior from exposure to cocaine in utero.

And finally, we tried to think about how to intervene in the different types of externalizing behaviors.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Risk, externalizing behaviors & violence first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 31, 2014.”

A student presented on the Common Core standards and how they may impact adolescents’ learning and development more generally. He summarized some of the work by Eccles and colleagues on stage-environment fit, talked about No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, summarized the goals of Common Core, discussed potential benefits and risks of Common Core, brought up the risk of teacher blaming, and mentioned larger-scale issues beyond curricula that affect performance. I then asked students, who were mostly critical of Common Core, to propose solutions to the educational challenges in the US, and they came up with some interesting suggestions, including more vocational training for non-college bound adolescents, more flexibility to individualize curricula,  and structural changes.

I talked about some of my favorite cross-cultural studies, by Saxe (1982, 1988), on the importance of context for studying mathematical thinking.

And we talked about neuroscience work coming out of various research groups, including Casey and Steinberg (plus check out work by my colleague, Chuck Geier), that helps to explain increases in risk taking in adolescence.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Cognition and Schools first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 24, 2014.”

I love talking about peer relationships. An alum of our program used to say that if she wasn’t a grad student in HDFS, she should have become a race car driver. My very boring version of the, if I wasn’t… game is, I would be a peer researcher.

This week’s presentation was on what the Internet, cell phones, and other forms of social technology mean for adolescent relationships. Our student presenter, who is also a sexual health educator, freaked everyone out by discussing all of the newest forms of social media that adolescents use (Facebook had 3 million fewer 13-17 year old users in 2014 compared to 2011).  So she discussed a range of other social media that have become popular with adolescents: snapchat, tinder, blendr, kik messenger, whisper app, ask.fm, seeking arrangement. If you don’t know them all, look them up… or don’t; you may not be able to handle it. She also discussed work on cyberbullying, including work by Sinclair and colleagues (2012), and not yet published work by Diane Felmlee. 

We read some classics, including Brown, Mory, & Kinney (1994) and Kinney (1993) which led to good discussions about crowds and the shaping of social interactions and identity. This discussion requires me to share my very own yearbook photo due to a longstanding agreement with a high school classmate – always a hoot for everyone but me. And we spent a lot of time talking about peer influence, selection, and socialization.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Peers first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 4, 2014.”

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.”

This semester I’m teaching a graduate course in adolescent development. I used to really struggle with assigning readings in this course. The first 2-3 to assign would be easy – a review chapter, an important conceptual piece, and/or an important historical empirical paper. But I often struggled to assign a more contemporary empirical piece, because determining the one paper that could represent the entire recent field was challenging.

A few years ago I arrived at a satisfying (to me at least) solution. I assign some readings, but then each student is responsible for finding, summarizing, and sharing a recent empirical paper. They summarize this paper in a standardized google doc format, and everyone reads the summaries before class. I like this format because: (1) it increases the breadth of knowledge that we all experience before and during class, with (this semester) 9 recent empirical papers represented; (2) each student can connect the week’s readings to their area of interest (e.g., puberty and peer relationships; identity and peer relationships; transition to adulthood and peer relationships); (3) it increases ownership in the course content for each student, because every week, each student has some relevant expertise that no one else has.  It also improves our ability to talk about measurement given the range of measures represented across readings. You can find my current syllabus for this course here.

By the end of the semester, I’m exposed to a lot of new and exciting research across the field of adolescent development. To give you a taste, I’ve decided that each week I will (try to) write briefly about the articles we discussed that led to the most engaged discussion. Last week’s topic was puberty:

1. Stein & Resier (1994). It’s now 20 years old, and there are clear methodological limitations, but I still love assigning this paper.  Puberty is one of the few areas where we know more about girls than boys, and the societal sense of when a boy truly reaches puberty, and what markers he may experience is always murky. Talking about first ejaculation seems so much harder for adolescents, parents (and researchers) than talking about menstruation, and this paper always engenders interesting discussion.

2.  Jacobsen, Oda, Knutsen, & Fraser (2009). Our class this semester includes students from HDFS, sociology, and nursing. This paper on associations between early menarche, heart disease, and mortality led to discussion about biology as destiny and the age old biology/context tug-of-war.

3.  Ellis, Shirtcliff, Boyce, Deardorff, & Essex (2011). Again, the disciplinary diversity of the students in the class this semester created some engaged discussion around biology and context and their interplay.

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