This longitudinal study used a national probability sample of adolescents to examine whether attachments to the family and school reduced five forms of adolescent deviance: cigarette smoking, alcohol use, marijuana use, delinquency, and violent behavior. The authors assessed whether these factors reduced the overall frequency, prevalence, and intensity of each problem behavior. The study also examined the power of these attachments to reduce deviance among adolescents who were differentiated in terms of gender, ethnicity, and their community’s level of economic deprivation. Overall, adolescent attachments to family and school tended to reduce the overall frequency, prevalence, and intensity of deviant involvement, regardless of community context, gender, or ethnic group. Parental reports of attachment to the adolescent, compared with adolescent reports of connection to the family, were the stronger predictors of lower levels of deviance. Attachment to school predicted lower levels of initiation of deviant behavior but did not predict the intensity of deviance.

Historically in the United States, the public sector has served as an equalizing institution through the expansion of job opportunities for minority workers. This study examines whether the public sector continues to serve as an equalizing institution in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using data from the Current Population Survey, I investigate changes in public sector employment between 2003 and 2013. My results point to a post-recession double disadvantage for black public sector workers: they are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are more likely than white and Hispanic public sector workers to experience job loss. These two trends are a historical break for the public sector labor market. I find that race and ethnicity gaps in public sector employment cannot be explained by differences in education, occupation, or any of the other measurable factors that are typically associated with employment. Among unemployed workers who most recently worked for the public sector, black women are the least likely to transition into private sector employment.

Young children's competency as witnesses in legal proceedings has been debated during the past several years. This has been due in part to greater emphasis on prosecuting perpetrators of child sexual abuse and the consequent increase in the number of children being asked to testify at the trial of their alleged abusers. Little basic research has been done on one component of competency: children's definitions of the truth and lies. In this article, federal and state rules of evidence and case law regarding children's competency are reviewed. Previous investigations of children's definitions of lies are then presented, followed by a description of a more recent experiment. The results of this experiment suggest that children do have definitions of the truth in one regard that make it appropriate for them to be considered competent witnesses. The results also raise concerns about young children's eyewitness ability.

This is the first known study to estimate household characteristics and coping behaviors associated with utility disconnections in the United States. We capitalize on a measure of disconnections available in the Residential Energy Consumption Survey that is administered by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Using the 2015 panel, we analyzed the prevalence of disconnection notices, disconnection of services, and related coping strategies, including: forgoing basic necessities, maintaining an unhealthy home temperature, and receiving energy assistance. Findings indicate that nearly 15% of U.S. households received a disconnection notice and 3%—more than three million households—experienced a service disconnection in 2015. Our results further demonstrate that more households resorted to forgoing basic necessities than maintaining an unhealthy temperature or receiving energy assistance, though many families used a combination of strategies to prevent or respond to the threat or experience of being disconnected. We discuss implications for future research on material hardships, survival strategies, and the health impacts of poverty.

According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, state-level poverty rates range from a low of less than 10 percent in Iowa to a high of more than 20 percent in California. We seek to account for these differences using a theoretical framework proposed by Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen (2017), which emphasizes the prevalence of poverty risk factors as well as poverty penalties associated with each risk factor. We estimate state-specific penalties and prevalences associated with single motherhood, low education, young households, and joblessness. We also consider state variation in the poverty risks associated with living in a black household and a Hispanic immigrant household. Brady et al. (2017) find that country-level differences in poverty rates are more closely tied to penalties than prevalences. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the opposite is true for state-level differences in poverty rates. Although we find that state poverty differences are closely tied to the prevalence of high-risk populations, our results do not suggest that state-level antipoverty policy should be solely focused on changing "risky" behavior. Based on our findings, we conclude that state policies should take into account cost-of-living penalties as well as the state-specific relationship between poverty, prevalences, and penalties.