This article examines trends and developments in social interactions of young people and the role of social media in Luxembourg using a mixed method approach, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data. Our findings corroborate that social interactions via social media play a growing role in leisure time of young people and have changed the traditional patterns of friendship-driven social interactions among peers. We argue that although offline interactions remain very important for young people, they have been complemented and partially replaced by interactions via social media. Modes of young people’s social media interactions can be characterized as mixed modalities.

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Acts of violence against foreigners, which increased dramatically between 1991 and 1993 in Germany, have triggered an intense discussion about racism, right-wing extremism and counter-culture youth violence. But this discussion has frequently been conducted without regard for the empirical data. This article sets out to bring some of this data into the discourse.Representive opinion polls are employed to show that there is no detectable increase in hostile or ethnocentric attitudes towards foreigners in the German population which could explain the rise of anti-foreigner violence in the early 1990s. Police data on the biographical and socio-demographic characteristics of the perpetrators are analysed to demonstrate that the groups of anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner activists are too heterogeneous to be sweepingly labelled as racists or right-wing extremists. It is emphasised that a specific historial constellation (new waves of immigration; disorientation after German unification) and a sequence of escalating interactions -between police, political parties, segments of the population, the media, right-wing extremists, violenceprone youth groups -have led to an unexpected emergence of violence against foreigners.

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The paper explores gender inequalities between 45 countries across 10 health indicators among adolescents and whether those differences in health correlate with gender inequality in general. Methods: Data from 71,942 students aged 15 years from 45 countries who participated in the 2018 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey were analyzed. For this purpose, 10 indicators were selected, representing a broad spectrum of health outcomes. The gender differences in the countries were first presented using odds ratios. Countries with similar risk profiles were grouped together using cluster analyses. For each of the 10 indicators, the correlation with the Gender Inequality Index was examined. Results: The cluster analysis reveals systematic gender inequalities, as the countries can be divided into seven distinct groups with similar gender inequality patterns. For eight of the 10 health indicators, there is a negative correlation with the Gender Inequality Index: the greater the gender equality in a country, the higher the odds that girls feel fat, have low support from families, have low life satisfaction, have multiple health complaints, smoke, drink alcohol, feel school pressure, and are overweight compared with boys. Four indicators show a divergence: the higher the gender equality in a country in general, the larger the differences between boys and girls regarding life satisfaction, school pressure, multiple health complaints, and feeling fat. Conclusions: Countries that are geographically and historically linked are similar in terms of the health risks for boys and girls. The results challenge the assumption that greater gender equality is always associated with greater health equality.