1. Toolkit Focuses on Partnerships Between Home Visiting Models and Child Care
2. Brief Examines Practice Coaching in Primary Care
3. Study Investigates Differences in Aggression Among Children in Nine Countries
4. Article Explores Co-Occurrence of Substance Use and Bullying Behaviors Among U.S. Adolescents
5. Authors Assess Ethnic Differences in Perceived Appearance and Body Satisfaction

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1. Toolkit Focuses on Partnerships Between Home Visiting Models and Child Care

Home Away from Home: A Toolkit for Planning Home Visiting Partnerships with Family, Friend, and Neighbor Caregivers provides state policymakers and advocates with strategies for extending and expanding access to state-funded or federally funded home visiting through partnerships with providers of Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) child care. The toolkit, produced by the Center for Law and Social Policy, includes an overview of what home visiting partnerships with FFN providers may look like and the role of such partnerships. It also contains a tool to walk through questions that may need to be answered as states develop home visiting and FFN partnerships, as well as a discussion of potential policy changes that may need to be considered and case studies of existing partnerships between home visiting models and FFN providers in specific states and communities. The toolkit is available at http://www.clasp.org/admin/site/publications/files/Home-Away-from-Home.pdf

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2. Brief Examines Practice Coaching in Primary Care

Facilitating Improvement in Primary Care: The Promise of Practice Coaching clarifies the essential features of practice coaching and offers guidance for health-systems leaders, public and private insurers, and federal and state policymakers on how best to structure and design these programs in primary care settings. The issue brief, published by the Commonwealth Fund, presents a brief history of practice coaching, practice coach titles and qualifications, process skills for coaches, and an example of practice coaching in action. It also addresses considerations when taking practice coaching to scale, such as dose-response characteristics, readiness for change, training for coaches and coach qualifications, and organizational and business models. The brief also contains conclusions, policy implications, and an annotated bibliography of practice-coaching studies from Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The brief is available online.

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3. Study Investigates Differences in Aggression Among Children in Nine Countries

"We found that childhood relational and physical aggression share a common factor structure across nine countries. However, we also found that countries differ significantly in the mean levels of both relational and physical aggression that children report using," write the authors of an article published in the July-August 2012 issue of Aggressive Behavior. Aggression during childhood is a major concern not only because of the detrimental effects of aggression on its victims but also because of the long-term negative developmental consequences associated with being a perpetrator or victim of aggression during childhood. The defining characteristic of aggressive behavior is the aggressor’s intent to cause harm to another person, but the form that aggressive behavior takes can be either direct (involving a physical or verbal confrontation with the victim) or nondirect (relational, social, or indirect aggression). Because previous research on aggression has been conducted primarily using North American and Western European samples, it is unclear to what extent different forms of childhood aggression are present in countries that are underrepresented in the developmental literature, whether associations between relational and physical aggression are similar or different across countries, and whether there are gender differences in different forms of aggression across countries. The article addresses these issues using data on children's self-reported relational and physical aggression in nine countries.

Children ages 7-10 from 1,410 families in nine countries responded to questions about their relational and physical aggression as part of the larger Parenting Across Cultures Project. Participants were recruited through schools serving socioeconomically diverse populations in Jinan and Shanghai, China; Medellin, Columbia; Naples and Rome, Italy; Kisumu, Kenya; Manila, Phillipines; Trollhattan and Vanersborg, Sweden; Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Durham, North Carolina, United States. Children were asked how often in the last 30 days they engaged in a series of aggressive acts. Three items were tested as indicators of relational aggression: excluding another child from a group, trying to keep others from liking someone by saying mean things about that person, and saying things about another child to make people laugh. Three items were tested as indicators of physical aggression: throwing something at someone to hurt them, shoving or pushing, and hitting or slapping other children. Responses were dichotomized into "no" (never) or "yes" (one or more times in the last 30 days).

The authors found that

• Relational and physical aggression shared a common factor structure in nine diverse countries.
• In some countries, relational aggression was more frequent than physical aggression, whereas in other countries, physical aggression was more frequent than relational aggression, and the mean levels of relational and physical aggression varied across countries.
• In all nine countries, more frequent use of relational aggression was moderately to highly correlated with more frequent use of physical aggression.
• Boys were more likely to report being physically aggressive than girls across countries, but there were no consistent gender differences in relational aggression across countries.

"Overall, the findings of the study provide support for distinct concepts of childhood relational and physical aggression in several national contexts, suggesting that that distinction is quite robust," the authors conclude.

Lansford JE, Skinner AT, Sorbring E, et al. 2012. Boys' and girls' relational and physical aggression in nine countries. Aggressive Behavior 38(4):298-308. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ab.21433

Readers: More information is available from the following MCH Library resource:

- Adolescent Violence Prevention: Knowledge Path at
http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/kp_adolvio.html

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4. Article Explores Co-Occurrence of Substance Use and Bullying Behaviors Among U.S. Adolescents

"Our results suggest that substance use and bullying behaviors co-occur among a subpopulation of U.S. adolescents . . . who are more likely to be males, older adolescents, Hispanics, and tend to spend a greater number of evenings with friends," write the authors of an article published in the Journal of Adolescence online on June 13, 2012. Substance use and bullying are two problem behaviors prevalent in adolescence, and both are correlated with a broad array of adverse developmental outcomes. Using a latent class analysis (LCA) model, the study described in this article examined the co-occurrence of four types of substance use behaviors (cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, drunkenness, and marijuana use) and five types of bullying behaviors (physical attack, verbal teasing, social exclusion, spreading rumors, and cyber bullying). The researchers addressed three questions: (1) to what extent do different subtypes of bullying and substance use behaviors co-occur among U.S. adolescents; (2) what are the demographic differences between classes of adolescents with varying levels of involvement in bullying and substance-use behaviors; and (3) how do spending more evenings with peers and paternal and maternal knowledge relate to adolescents’ susceptibility to risks for substance use, bullying behaviors, and the co-occurrence of the two?

Data were obtained from the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children 2005-2006 study. The analytic sample included 7,508 U.S. adolescents from grades 6 to 10. After testing, the authors chose a four-class model with classes as follows. Class 1: non-involved, class 2: substance users, class 3: bullies, and class 4: substance-using bullies.

The authors found that

• Compared to males, females were more likely to be substance users, less likely to be bullies, and less likely to be substance-using bullies.
• Compared to younger adolescents, older adolescents were more likely to be substance users, less likely to be bullies, and more likely to be substance-using bullies.
• Compared to whites, African Americans were more likely to be bullies, and Hispanics were more likely to be substance users and substance-using bullies.
• Compared to those who reported higher level of maternal knowledge, adolescents with lower level of maternal knowledge were more likely to be substance users, bullies, and substance-using bullies.
• Compared to those who reported higher level of paternal knowledge, adolescents with lower level of paternal knowledge were more likely to be substance users, bullies, and substance-using bullies.
• Compared to those who spent less evening time with friends (0-2 evenings per week), those who spent more evening time (3-7 evenings per week) with friends were more likely to be substance users, bullies, and substance-using bullies.
• When the parental and peer variables were included, the gender and age differences remained significant.
• Compared to whites, African Americans were less likely to be substance users but more
  likely to be bullies. Hispanics were more likely to be substance-using bullies, and other races and ethnicities were less likely to be bullies.

The authors conclude that "understanding the demographic characteristics of substance users, bullies and substance-using bullies may facilitate the development of prevention and intervention programs through effective identification of adolescents who are likely to engage in multiple problem behaviors." They continue, "moreover, parental knowledge and evenings spent with peers were found to associate with class membership, suggesting that they may serve as points of intervention as far as the prevention of substance use and bullying are considered."

Luk JW, Wang J, Simons-Morton BG. 2012. The co-occurrence of substance use and bullying behaviors among U.S. adolescents: Understanding demographic characteristics and social influences. Journal of Adolescence [published online on June 13, 2012]. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2012.05.003

Readers: More information is available from the following MCH Library resources:

- Bullying: Resource Brief at
http://www.mchlibrary.info/guides/bullying.html

- Tobacco, Alcohol, and Substance Use in Children and Adolescents: Resource Brief at
http://www.mchlibrary.info/guides/substanceuse.html

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5. Authors Assess Ethnic Differences in Perceived Appearance and Body Satisfaction

"There are substantial differences in perceived appearance and body satisfaction across the three largest ethnic groups of school-age children in the U.S.," write the authors of an article published in BMC Public Health online on June 12, 2012. There is a large body of evidence addressing differences in weight, weight perceptions, satisfaction with weight, and their links with perceived appearance and attractiveness across ethnic groups in multiethnic populations like those in the United States or the United Kingdom. However, the genesis of these differences and their development across the age spectrum remain insufficiently understood. The article examines ethnic, sex, and age differences in body satisfaction and perceptions of physical appearance vs. body mass index (BMI) among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adolescents ages 11 to 17.

Data for the study were drawn from the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HSBC) survey, a collaborative cross-sectional survey to assess the prevalence of health behaviors and to gain insight into the influence of the social context on young people's well-being. The present article analyzed data from the HSBC anonymous survey of a representative national sample of U.S. students in grades 6 though 10 during the 2001-2002 school year. Only those students in three ethnic groups (African-American, non-Hispanic white, and Hispanic) who had completed questions about body satisfaction and perception of body appearance were included in the analysis (n=13,267). The analysis compared sample descriptive characteristics across ethnic groups. The association between age and perceived appearance was analyzed using separate models for both genders and the three ethnic groups. Models were also used to assess the association between age and body satisfaction and between BMI and body satisfaction.

The authors found that

• The proportion of adolescents who considered themselves very good looking decreased with age among both genders and all three ethnic groups, with the exception of African-American females.
• The patterns of change across age did not differ between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics but was significantly different among African Americans; while the proportion of African-American females who considered themselves very good looking fluctuated consistently at a higher level than did corresponding proportions in other groups, the proportion of African-American males who considered themselves very good looking decreased substantially between age 11 (nearly 60 percent) and age 17 (around 30 percent).
• Body satisfaction did not differ over the age range studied except among non-Hispanic white females. The proportion of non-Hispanic white females considering themselves too fat nearly doubled between ages 11 and 15 but remained stable between ages 15 and 17.
• Non-Hispanic white and Hispanic males did not differ in the relationships between weight perceptions and BMI, but African-American males were less likely than non-Hispanic white and Hispanic males to consider themselves too fat at the same BMI levels. This tendency was even more pronounced among African-American females; however there was also a difference between non-Hispanic white and Hispanic females, with the former starting to label themselves as too fat at lower BMI levels.

"For many adolescents perceived appearance and body satisfaction are most likely established before the age of 10, with little change during adolescence. Since both perceptions are potentially related to weight problems and poor health, their early stability underlines the importance of primary schools and parents in prevention. Special attention should be targeted to the dramatic loss of positive perceived appearance among African-American boys in the analyzed age spectrum," conclude the authors.

Mikolajczyk RT, Iannotti RJ, Farhat TM, et al. 2012. Ethnic differences in perceptions of body satisfaction and body appearance among U.S. schoolchildren: A cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health [published online on June 12, 2012]. Available (open access) at http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-12-425.pdf

Readers: More information is available from the following MCH Library resources:

- Overweight and Obesity in Children and Adolescents: Knowledge Path at
http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/kp_overweight.html

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