Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Round 4 data set was used to examine self-reported drinking behaviors of student and
non-student 18 to 21 year olds. The results of this brief compare NLSY97 findings to the results of the published major binge drinking research literature.

The study found that when abstainers are included in the analysis, 43.7 percent- of college students and 34.5 percent- of non-college students admit to
binge drinking on at least one occasion in the past 30 days. In the 30 days before the interview, non-students had consumed more alcohol per day on the days they drank than college students had. Non-students reported that they consumed a mean of 5.58 alcoholic drinks on the
days they drank and college students reported a mean of 4.76 drinks. The results also seem to indicate that respondents who engage in binge
drinking behaviors do so at least once every two weeks.

These findings generally agree with previous studies' findings that college students have a higher prevalence of binge drinking than their
same-age non-student counterparts. Researchers attempting to understand other life factors and correlates of binge drinking behavior should take note of this agreement.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A central question for political economists has been whether or not economic globalization has played a significant role in fostering neoliberal reforms of the welfare state in developed capitalist democracies. In the present paper, I provide a synopsis of a decade or more of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence about the international sources of contemporary trajectories of social protection. I then offer new tests of international sources of policy changes in programmatic features in core areas of social protection. The central contributions of the paper are to (1) articulate and test the role of international diffusion of neoliberal reforms along side tests of direct trade openness and capital market pressures on the maintenance of social welfare provision; (2) offer simultaneous tests of key domestic political economic pressures on, and supports of, social welfare protection; and (3) base such tests on newly available data on programmatic features of welfare states that extends into the 21st Century. The evidence suggests that social welfare provision, itself highly resilient to significant change in the short-term, has been negatively pressured by the competition-driven international diffusion of neoliberalism, international financial liberalization and rises in levels of domestic unemployment; evidence also suggests that the generosity of social protection has been simultaneously buoyed by insurance and compensation consequences of economic openness and by social corporatism.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Across the social sciences, the typical study of poverty assesses the individual characteristics that explain why people are poor. In recent years, sociologists have called on inequality researchers to contextualize socio-economic attainment within the institutions and social relations that generate inequality. Our study analyzes how the political context of affluent democracies, embodied by the welfare state and collective political actors, shapes poverty. Specifically, we conduct a multi-level analysis of working-aged adult poverty across 18 affluent Western democracies. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (N=336,066), we examine the individual-level characteristics of working-aged adults along with country-level data on the political context. While several individual characteristics have expected associations with poverty, some commonly studied characteristics fail to have robust significant effects across the affluent democracies. Our index of welfare generosity has a negative effect that is larger than the effects of almost all individual characteristics. The effect is also significant net of individual characteristics, economic performance and structural context. For a standard deviation increase in welfare generosity, the odds of poverty decline by more than 60 percent. A working-aged adult in the U.S. (the least generous welfare state) is about 180% more likely to be poor than a person with identical characteristics in Denmark (the most generous). The welfare state also reduces the impact of low education and the number of children. We show that collective political actors, especially Leftist parties in government, reduce the likelihood of poverty. Most of the effect of collective political actors channels through the welfare state, though some the effect combines with the welfare state. Ultimately, poverty is determined as much, if not more, by the political context in which an individual lives as the characteristics of that individual.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: Background and Aims: Research using imitation procedures show that younger children can imitate a live model only when the conditions at encoding and testing match, whereas older children can imitate even with changes to the conditions at testing. Whether this developmental pattern is also true of information conveyed using media, such as picture books, has yet to be explored. An immediate imitation procedure was thus used to investigate whether 18- and 24-month-olds (N=120) can generalize information learned from a picture book reading interaction to novel stimuli and contexts.

Methods: The experimenter read each participant a short picture book that depicted a child constructing a rattle in a three-step action sequence. The participant was then given the opportunity to re-enact the sequence. The children were either tested: 1) in the same room with the same stimuli (no change); 2) in a different room with the same stimuli (context change); 3) in the same room with different stimuli (stimuli change). The performance of these children was compared to age-matched controls that never saw the picture book but were allowed to construct the rattle.

Key Results: The mean number of target actions (0-3) the children produced was subjected to one-way ANOVAs across condition at each age with post-hoc SNK tests. The performance of the 24-month-old children in experimental groups (no change, stimuli change, and context change) did not differ and they produced more target acts than did the children in the control condition, F(3, 44) = 5.34, p < .005). The performance of the 18-month-old children in the no change condition produced more target actions than the children in the control condition, F(3, 48) = 3.34, p < .05. The performance of the children in the stimuli and context change conditions, however, was intermediate between the control and no change conditions.

Conclusions: Consistent with imitation studies showing generalization from a live model, there are also age-related changes in children’s ability to generalize from the contents of a picture book to novel situations. The 18-month-old children imitated only when the test conditions were similar to those at encoding (no change); however performance was disrupted with changes to the test context or stimuli. In contrast, 24-month-old children successfully imitated even with changes to the test context or stimuli. These data suggest that not only can young children learn from a symbolic medium but they can also generalize to different test conditions.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: David Rakison and colleagues examined the use of object parts to from categories (e.g., Rakison & Butterworth, 1998). They tested 14- to 24-month-olds with a combination of animal, vehicle and hybrid animal-vehicle toys, using a sequential touching task and found that infants’ apparent use of parts to form categories decreased with age: 14-month-olds always formed categories on the basis of parts, 18-month-olds sometimes formed categories on the basis of parts and sometimes on the basis of taxonomic structures, whereas 24-month-olds always formed categories on the basis of taxonomic kind (bodies). We examined the extent to which 18-month-olds would adapt their categorization of normal and hybrid stimuli as a function of context.

Fifty-two infants were tested using sequential touching on a set of 8 toys that could be partitioned as containing (1) the global level of animal, (2) the basic level of car, (3) objects having wheels, (4) objects having legs, (5) hybrid objects, or (6) as normal objects. Infants were randomly assigned to one of two prior context conditions in which they were shown some human dolls and trucks. In the Partonomic condition, the experimenter began by pointing out parts of the toys to the infants by bending the dolls at the waist and legs or by turning the trucks upside down and spinning their wheels. In the Taxonomic condition, the experimenter introduced the toys by “walking” the dolls (without bending the dolls at the waist or their legs) or by “driving” the trucks along the table.

Touch patterns were analyzed by fitting a finite mixture model to the data (Thomas and Dahlin; 2001). Many individual infants were found to categories in multiple ways. We then tabulated the number of infants that could be described as categorizing by parts, by taxonomic category, or by both. In the Taxonomic condition 22 categorized taxonomically, 2 categorized by parts, and 1 categorized both. In the Partonomic condition, 2 categorized taxonomically, 10 categorized by parts, and 0 categorized both. Categorization strategy was contingent on the familiarization context (Chi-squared (2) = 21.0, p<. 0001). The distribution of categorizers in the Partonomic context differed from chance, Chi-squared (2) = 14.0, p<. 001), with most of these infants forming categories on the basis of parts. The distribution of categorizers in the Taxonomic condition also differed from chance (Chi-squared (2) = 29.4, p<. 0001), with most of these infants forming categories on the basis of taxonomic information.