"The Glass is Half Full": Narratives from Young Adults on Parental Incarceration and Emerging Adulthood.

Prior literature highlights that children of incarcerated parents are more likely to endure negative life outcomes. Yet, this discussion is mainly centered on the immediate impacts of parental incarceration during childhood and adolescent years, with less focus on the longer-term consequences as these children emerge into adulthood. This study examined how young adults interpreted their experience of parental incarceration. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 young adults to understand their interpretations of parental incarceration as a turning point in specific transitions to adulthood: education and employment, intimate relationships, living independently, and parenthood. Findings demonstrate that, for some respondents, this experience created negative turning points, for example, by limiting their academic opportunities due to financial strain or a lack of support, hindering their trust in romantic partners, keeping them from living independently due to feelings of responsibility for the remaining parent, or by creating a fear of repeating the cycle with their own children. For other respondents, this experience created positive impacts on their lives because it provided a motivational push towards acquiring an education, accelerated them into becoming independent, or encouraged their desire to become a good parent and provide stability for their own children. There were also respondents who believed that the experience had no effects on certain life domains. These findings add to the growing body of research by providing support that parental incarceration can influence avenues for success and alter navigations into emerging adulthood.

Moderators of Friend Selection and Influence in Relation to Adolescent Alcohol Use.

Friendships form an important context in which adolescents initiate and establish alcohol use patterns, but not all adolescents may be equally affected by this context. Therefore, this study tests whether parenting practices (i.e., parental discipline, parental knowledge, unsupervised time with peers) and individual beliefs (i.e., alcohol descriptive norms, positive social expectations, moral approval of alcohol use) moderate friend selection and influence around alcohol use. Stochastic actor-based models were used to analyze longitudinal social network and survey data from 12,335 adolescents (aged 11 to 17, 51.3% female) who were participating in the PROSPER project. A separate model was estimated for each moderating variable. Adolescents who reported consistent parental discipline, less unsupervised time with peers, higher descriptive alcohol use norms, and less positive social expectations about alcohol use were less likely to select alcohol-using friends. Those who reported consistent parental discipline, better parental knowledge, lower descriptive alcohol use norms, and less positive social expectations were more influenced by their friends' level of alcohol use. Thus, adolescents with these characteristics whose friends frequently use alcohol are at greater risk whereas those whose friends do not use alcohol are at lower risk of using alcohol. The findings show that, although selection and influence processes are connected, they may function in different ways for different groups of adolescents. For some adolescents, it is particularly important to prevent them from selecting alcohol-using friends, because they are more susceptible to influence from such friends. These peer network dynamics might explain how proximal outcomes targeted by many prevention programs (i.e., parenting practices and individual beliefs) translate into changes in alcohol use.

Social distancing compliance: A video observational analysis.

PURPOSE: Virus epidemics may be mitigated if people comply with directives to stay at home and keep their distance from strangers in public. As such, there is a public health interest in social distancing compliance. The available evidence on distancing practices in public space is limited, however, by the lack of observational data. Here, we apply video observation as a method to examine to what extent members of the public comply with social distancing directives. DATA: Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage of interactions in public was collected in inner-city Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From the footage, we observed instances of people violating the 1.5-meter distance directives in the weeks before, during, and after these directives were introduced to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. RESULTS: We find that people complied with the 1.5-meter distance directives when these directives were first introduced, but that the level of compliance started to decline soon after. We also find that violation of the 1.5-meter distance directives is strongly associated with the number of people observed on the street and with non-compliance to stay-at-home directives, operationalized with large-scale aggregated location data from cell phones. All three measures correlate to a varying extent with temporal patterns in the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, temperature, COVID-19 related Google search queries, and media attention to the topic. CONCLUSION: Compliance with 1.5 meter distance directives is short-lived and coincides with the number of people on the street and with compliance to stay-at-home directives. Potential implications of these findings are that keep- distance directives may work best in combination with stay-at-home directives and place-specific crowd-control strategies, and that the number of people on the street and community-wide mobility as captured with cell phone data offer easily measurable proxies for the extent to which people keep sufficient physical distance from others at specific times and locations.