Aim To determine an impact of parental divorce to depression and intimate relationships of young people during adolescence, and prevalence of symptoms of depression and the level of intimacy in relations to adolescents living in intact families and those from divorced families. Methods This prospective descriptive research was conducted on a sample of 168 examinees of which 64 (38.1%) were stud...

Adolescents from areas of high deprivation are often assumed to have low aspirations for the future. However, recent research has suggested otherwise and there have been calls for more substantial investigation into the relationship between poverty and aspiration. This article reports levels and variation in aspiration from 1214 adolescents (49.5 % male; 50.5 % female) living in areas of high d...

OBJECTIVES To comprehensively examine the relationship between current sleep duration and past suicidal idea or attempt among Korean adolescents. METHODS Data came from the 2009 Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey with 75 066 participants (with the participation rate of 97.6%) in 800 middle and high schools. Binary logistic regression was conducted by gender and depressed mood to ident...

BACKGROUND There is paucity of data on the nutritional status of school-age children in Sagamu town of Southwestern Nigeria. OBJECTIVE To determine the nutritional status of primary school children in Sagamu Local Government Area, Nigeria. METHODS A cross-sectional survey of primary school children aged 6 to 10 years in Sagamu, Southwestern Nigeria was done. Eight schools were selected usin...

Frequentist confidence intervals for population ranks and their statistical justifications are not well established, even though there is a great need for such procedures in practice. How do we assign confidence bounds for the ranks of health care facilities, schools and financial institutions based on data that do not clearly separate the performance of different entities apart? The commonly u...

BACKGROUND The dearth of health and demographic data in sub-Saharan Africa from vital registration systems and its impact on effective planning for health and socio-economic development is widely documented. Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems have the capacity to address the dearth of quality data for policy making in resource-poor settings. OBJECTIVE This article demonstrates the ut...

BACKGROUND Highly refined surveillance data on the 2009 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic are crucial to quantify the spatial and temporal characteristics of the pandemic. There is little information about the spatial-temporal dynamics of pandemic influenza in South America. Here we provide a quantitative description of the age-specific morbidity pandemic patterns across administrative areas of Peru. ...

Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally trea...

Interventions targeting parents of young children have shown effectiveness, but research is lacking about best practices for engaging parents of early adolescents. Low levels of enrollment and attendance in parenting interventions present major problems for researchers and clinicians. Effective and efficient ways to engage and collaborate with parents to strengthen parenting practices and to pr...

A school-based environmental program to reduce adolescent smoking was conducted in 20 schools (10 intervention; 10 control) in south central Louisiana. The 9th grade cohort (n = 4,763; mean age = 15.4 yrs; 51% female; 61% Caucasian; 30-day smoking prevalence at baseline = 25%) was followed over four years for 30-day smoking prevalence with the school as the unit of analysis. Although prevalence...