Suchergebnisse

Can historians of childhood inform children's policy, and if so, how? Spurred by a panel at the 2009 meeting of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, this examination of scholarship on orphanages, juvenile delinquency, preschools, and the "boy problem," suggests that in addressing themes such as agency, social control, children's rights, and the relationship of the child and the state, many historians have attempted to provide perspective on policy issues. An outgrowth in part of concerns about children's policy in the 1960s, much research in the history of childhood explores how past policies went awry. In analyzing child abuse and abductions, for instance, historians have drawn attention to how panics are constructed and affect policy, with sometimes problematic consequences. When historians "enter the fray" of child advocacy, as have many of the leading players in the SHCY, their work can be used in unsettling ways when stakeholders seek simplistic solutions to complex problems. At the same time, the authors believe that there are many lessons from the past that can be used to illuminate contemporary conversations about children's needs and rights and promising policies for bettering their lives.

This study uses a social dilemma model of auditing and a model of cooperative regulatory enforcement to provide a framework within which the evolution of self‐regulation in the U.S. accounting profession is studied. From a social dilemma perspective, individual public accounting firms are best off, in a single period sense, by providing a low quality audit product, which is defined in terms of the degree of auditor acquiescence to managers' accounting method discretion. However, firms' collective welfare is maximized by high quality auditing. The cooperative regulatory model employed is premised on the existence of a plausible government threat of punishments and invasive regulations, which motivates self‐regulation in an industry. We argue that prior to enactment of the securities acts, public accounting firms faced a social dilemma in which there were limited incentives for high quality auditing either voluntarily or through the establishment of self‐regulation. The securities acts provided a plausible threat to which the accounting industry responded by implementing self‐regulation in order to avoid invasive and costly government regulation. After the emergence of the accounting profession, there occurred a long period of cooperative regulation with the SEC. Management discretion over accounting methods increased during this time period and audit quality correspondingly decreased, suggesting possible inefficient capture of the SEC. Evidence of an evolution towards a tripartite form of regulation appeared in the 1970s when the SEC and public accounting began to be critically reviewed by Congress. From this time to the present, new regulatory threats have motivated a series of self‐regulatory responses by public accounting to improve audit quality.

AbstractAdolescents are prone to risk-taking behaviors leading to adverse consequences such as substance abuse, accidents, violence, and victimization. However, little is known about the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences in the propensity for risk-taking. This study investigated developmental changes, longitudinal stability, and heritability of risk-taking using data from 752 adolescent twins including 169 MZ and 203 DZ pairs. The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), an experimental behavioral measure of risk taking, was administered to the twins at age 12 and then re-administered to a part of this sample at age 14. Risk-taking increased with age, but individual differences showed a significant longitudinal stability. Genetic model fitting showed that at age 12, heritability of risk-taking was modest but significant in both sexes, whereas at age 14, heritability increased to 55% in males and became nonsignificant in females. The findings suggest that propensity for risk-taking as measured by BART can be a useful endophenotype for genetic studies of adolescent externalizing psychopathology, however, the utility of this measure may be limited by sex differences in heritability.

AbstractMany studies have found strong peer correlations for a variety of problem behaviors that begin in adolescence (e.g. substance use). Such correlations are commonly attributed to peer influences, but could also be explained by selective ('assortative') friendship: the tendency for those with similar patterns of behavior to become friends. Here we show how, under certain assumptions, cross-sectional data from pairs of siblings or twins and their peers may be used to resolve the contributions of peer selection and reciprocal peer environmental influences to peer resemblance. We performed power calculations to determine necessary sample sizes for rejecting with 80% power, at the 5% significance level, the hypothesis of only peer selection effects, or only reciprocal peer environmental effects. A false hypothesis of only selective friendship effects was always easier to reject than a false hypothesis of only reciprocal peer environmental influences. Limitations of these simulations, including uncertainty about the most appropriate way to model peer selection, are discussed.

It is unknown whether there are racial differences in the heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD) because most psychiatric genetic studies have been conducted in samples comprised largely of white non-Hispanics. To examine potential differences between African-American (AA) and European-American (EA) young adult women in (1) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM-IV) MDD prevalence, symptomatology, and risk factors, and (2) genetic and/or environmental liability to MDD, we analyzed data from a large population-representative sample of twins ascertained from birth records (n = 550 AA and n = 3226 EA female twins) aged 18–28 years at the time of MDD assessment by semi-structured psychiatric interview. AA women were more likely to have MDD risk factors; however, there were no significant differences in lifetime MDD prevalence between AA and EA women after adjusting for covariates (odds ratio = 0.88, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.67–1.15). Most MDD risk factors identified among AA women were also associated with MDD at similar magnitudes among EA women. Although the MDD heritability point estimate was higher among AA women than EA women in a model with paths estimated separately by race (56%, 95% CI: 29–78% vs. 41%, 95% CI: 29–52%), the best fitting model was one in which additive genetic and non-shared environmental paths for AA and EA women were constrained to be equal (A = 43%, 33–53% and E = 57%, 47–67%). In spite of a marked elevation in the prevalence of environmental risk exposures related to MDD among AA women, there were no significant differences in lifetime prevalence or heritability of MDD between AA and EA young women.