Uses a social network approach to examine how work and friendship ties in a university research group were associated with the kinds of media used for different kinds of information exchange. The use of electronic mail, unscheduled face-to-face encounters, and scheduled face-to-face meetings predominated. (Author/LRW)

Compared sexual risk behavior of female athletes and nonathletes. Examined mediation, reverse mediation, spurious effects, and moderated causal models, using as potential mediators physical development, educational aspirations, self-esteem, attitudes toward pregnancy, involvement in a romantic relationship, age, ethnicity, and social class. Found…

Used National Maternal and Infant Health Survey data to examine effects of poverty and maternal depression on child development. Found that maternal depression and poverty jeopardized development of very young children. Affluence somewhat buffered the deleterious consequences of depression. Chronic maternal depression had severe implications for…

College-preference studies can help administrators identify a potential pool of desirable students and implement new recruitment techniques. This study, which supports earlier findings, used a logistic regression model to investigate the effects of variables relating student characteristics and institutional factors on the decision to apply to a…

The aging of the United States population is creating an increased need for social workers and other helping professionals with training in gerontology. Recent estimates indicate that less than 3% of MSW students are enrolled in an aging concentration, as compared to 19.0% enrolled in children/youth concentrations. This study (N=126) examines…

The authors show how the work of Nobel Laureates in economics can enhance student understanding and bring them up to date on topics such as probability, uncertainty and decision theory, hypothesis testing, regression to the mean, instrumental variable techniques, discrete choice modeling, and time-series analysis. (Contains 2 notes.)

Whether hierarchical logistic regression can reduce the sample size requirement for estimating optimal cutoff scores in a course placement service where predictive validity is measured by a threshold utility function is explored. Data from courses with varying class size were randomly partitioned into two halves per course. Nonhierarchical and…

The continuing increase in cancer rates among women in the United States is forcing more men to experience the impact of breast cancer on their relationships. Using 71 male partners of newly diagnosed breast cancer patients, this study assessed how dyadic coping strategies affected men's adjustment to their partners' illness. While their partners…

In multiple-cue learning (also known as probabilistic category learning) people acquire information about cue-outcome relations and combine these into predictions or judgments. Previous researchers claimed that people can achieve high levels of performance without explicit knowledge of the task structure or insight into their own judgment…

The authors describe the initiation and use of a Web-based triage system in a college health setting. During the first 4 months of implementation, the system recorded 1,290 encounters. More women accessed the system (70%); the average age was 21.8 years. The Web-based triage system advised the majority of students to seek care within 24 hours;…

Research on the effect of suicide stories in the media on suicide in the real world has been marked by much debate and inconsistent findings. Recent narrative reviews have suggested that research based on nonfictional models is more apt to uncover imitative effects than research based on fictional models. There is, however, substantial variation…

A meta-analysis was conducted on all studies of suicide mortality in follow-up studies of schizophrenic patients that presented data for male and female patients separately. The percentage of deaths from suicide was significantly greater for the male schizophrenic patients than for the female schizophrenic patients in studies where both sexes were…

This article compares several procedures in their efficacy for detecting differential item functioning (DIF): logistic regression analysis, the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) procedure, and the modified Mantel-Haenszel procedure by Mazor, Clauser, and Hambleton. It also compares the effect size measures that these procedures provide. In this study,…

College students critique their professors' teaching at RateMyProfessors.com, a web page where students anonymously rate their professors on Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness. Using the self-selected data from this public forum, we examine the relations between quality, easiness, and sexiness for 3190 professors at 25 universities. For faculty with…

Background: A minority of patients with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not respond favorably to methylphenidate. This has been partially associated with homozygosity for the Dopamine transporter (DAT1) 10-repeat allele and the presence of one or two Dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) 7-repeat alleles. This study examined the sibling…