ICPSR Research Paper Competition winners feature Add Health data

In a special edition of the ICPSR Bulletin, ICPSR announced that both winners of their 2016 Research Paper Competition used Add Health data in their analyses.

The winner of the Master’s competition, Brielle Bryan, found that adolescents whose fathers were recently incarcerated have more disadvantaged social networks. This means the adolescents feel isolated, have less friends, and are connected with more delinquent friends and less academically successful peers. Brielle is a doctoral student at Harvard University, and her paper is entitled “Parental Incarceration and Adolescent Social Network Disadvantage.”

Candace M. Evans, of McMurry University, won the Undergraduate competition for her paper entitled “The Moderating Effects of Race and Ethnicity on the Relationship between Body Image and Psychological Well-Being.” This paper showed that the link between body image and self-esteem differed depending on racial/ethnic group. For example, Latinas had lower self-esteem than whites and blacks when they felt they were underweight or overweight.

Read the official announcement and access the full papers on ICPSR’s website.  Information on entering the 2017 competition is also available.

You may also download the Add Health public use data from ICPSR.

Parent Involvement Helps Teens Stay Away from Alcohol

Using data from Add Health, researchers Donaldson, Handren and Crano examined the relationship between teens and their parents and parental effect on teenage drinking. Teens with parents who were more supportive and monitored their children were less likely to binge drink. Parental protection from teenage binge drinking may also protect against future criminal behavior, as binge drinking was shown to be predictive of future arrests.

NPR Excerpt:

The study suggests that parents do make a difference. “Parental monitoring and warmth are a protective device against kids’ binge drinking,” says Crano. But the two need to go hand in hand. “If you have surveillance without warmth, you’ve got a problem,” he adds. “You want the relationship between a parent and a child to be close enough and warm enough that the child discloses behaviors and what they are thinking, and the parent can offer advice” that reinforces rules but doesn’t disparage the child.

Read the full story on NPR.

Scholarly Source: Donaldson CD, Handren LM, Crano WD. The Enduring Impact of Parents’ Monitoring, Warmth, Expectancies, and Alcohol Use on Their Children’s Future Binge Drinking and Arrests: a Longitudinal Analysis. Prev Sci (2016) 17:606. doi:10.1007/s11121-016-0656-1. Article available online.

The Atlantic Features Add Health Research Findings on Purity Pledges

Summary: Using Add Health data, researchers Anthony Paik, Kenneth J. Sanchagrin and Karen Heimer examined the sexual and reproductive health of young women who take purity pledges to remain abstinent until marriage.  They found that most young women break their pledges, and that when they do, those pledge breakers are more likely than their peers to contract HPV or experience nonmarital pregnancy.  

Read the story from The Atlantic:  The Unintended Consequences of Purity Pledges

Excerpt:

“The results showed that women who did or did not take abstinence pledges were equally likely to get HPV—about 27 percent of each group would eventually contract the virus, which causes genital warts. Among women who had multiple sexual partners, however, pledge breakers were more likely to get HPV.

The results were even more striking for out-of-wedlock pregnancy: About 18 percent of the girls who had never taken virginity pledges became pregnant within six years after they began having sex. Meanwhile, 30 percent of those who had taken a pledge—and broken it—got pregnant while not married.

…….

‘Our research indicates that abstinence pledging can have unintended negative consequences by increasing the likelihood of HPV and non-marital pregnancies, the majority of which are unintended,” Paik said in a statement. “Abstinence-only sex education policy is widespread at the state and local levels and may return at the federal level, and this policy approach may be contributing to the decreased sexual and reproductive health of girls and young women.'”


Scholarly Source: Paik A, Sanchagrin KJ, Heimer K.  Broken Promises: Abstinence Pledging and Sexual and Reproductive Health.  Journal of Marriage and Family 2016; 78 (2): 546-561. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12279.  Article available online

Add Health Director, Dr. Kathleen Mullan Harris, Receives 2016 Golden Goose Award

Drs. Peter Bearman, Barbara Entwisle, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Ronald Rindfuss, and Richard Udry were awarded the 2016 Golden Goose Award for their work in developing the Add Health study. The Golden Goose award aims to “recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact.”

In the award announcement, Add Health is described as “a landmark example of how longitudinal research can yield extraordinary and unexpected insights.”  The study’s importance is further described in the following excerpt:

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult HealthAdd Health, for short—is a gold standard basic research study on human health, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has had profound impacts on society and helped shape the national conversation around adolescent health. With its revolutionary open-access model – nearly all of the survey data is publicly available as soon as it has been collected and processed – it has made possible an enormous range of scientific studies that have strengthened our understanding of the importance of family connectedness to adolescent health, allowed us to track and scrutinize the rising tide of the obesity epidemic, and demonstrated the social, behavioral, and biological importance of adolescence to lifelong health and well-being.

Everyone at Add Health would like to thank the Golden Goose Award committee and extend heartfelt congratulations to the winners of the award!

This year’s award winners received their Golden Goose statues at the September 22, 2016 ceremony held at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.  2016 awardees also included the researchers leading The Honeybee Algorithm and Sex Life of the Screwworm Fly studies.  

Drs Barbara Entwisle (L) and Kathleen Mullan Harris (R) with their Golden Goose statues at the Library of Congress. 

Click here to watch the Golden Goose Award 2016 documentary video.

Intimate partner violence in adolescence and later cardiovascular disease risk

 

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a research team led by Cari Jo Clark at the University of Minnesota examined both victimization and perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV) among young adults, aged 18-28. Then they examined cardiovascular risk factors in the same respondents when they were adults between the ages of 24-34.  Risk factors included age, sex, blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, BMI, and use of antihypertensive medication.

Analyses showed that about 40% of the sample had been exposed to IPV in adolescence and young adulthood; these individuals were more likely than those with no IPV exposure to have a cardiovascular disease event in later adulthood. Researchers propose that a number of mechanisms may be involved with this increased risk, including a link between IPV, unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, and depression. Early stress is also tied to altered functioning of the body’s stress and metabolic systems. The authors encourage health providers to increase awareness about the occurrence and risks of IPV.

View the abstract or download the complete article from Preventative Medicine

 Authors:

  • Cari Jo Clark, Department of Medicine, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, Program in Health Disparities Research, University of Minnesota
  • Alvaro Alonso, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota
  • Susan A. Everson-Rose, Department of Medicine, Program in Health Disparities Research and Center for Health Equity, University of Minnesota
  • Rachael A. Spencer, Independent Gender Based Violence Specialist, Atlanta, GA
  • Sonya S. Brady, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota
  • Michael D. Resnick, Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota
  • Iris W. Borowsky, Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota
  • John E. Connett, Division of Biostatistics, Biostatistical Design and Analysis Center, University of Minnesota
  • Robert F. Krueger, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota
  • Viann N. Nguyen-Feng, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota
  • Steven L. Feng, Department of Internal Medicine, Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis, MN
  • Shakira F. Suglia, Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University

 

Clark et al. Intimate partner violence in late adolescence and young adulthood and subsequent cardiovascular risk in adulthood. Preventative Medicine 2016; 87: 132-137.

Add Health Ranked ICPSR’s Top Downloaded Study

Add Health has been ranked as ICPSR’s top downloaded study from January 1 – June 1, 2018. According to ICPSR user statistics, the public use data have been accessed more than 2,700 times by more than 2,400 unique users during the first half of 2018.

Add Health public use datasets, documentation files, and codebooks are available via ICPSR, the Odum Institute Dataverse Network, and Sociometrics.   

Click here to learn more about Add Health public use data, including information about the datasets and accessing the data.

To read ICPSR’s report, click here.

Add Health metadata now available on Maelstorm Research Repository

 

Maelstrom Research at McGill University has incorporated Add Health public-use data into a searchable metadata catalogue that will facilitate the identification of constructs and measures common across longitudinal studies of aging worldwide.

Maelstrom hosts an associated harmonization platform that assists in developing ways to create commensurate measures in situations where the specific variables collected differ across different studies. 
 
Add Health public-use data is now harmonized across all four waves and variables can be compared to other longitudinal study measures by searching the Maelstrom repository.

The Add Health study profile is available on the Maelstrom Research website:

https://www.maelstrom-research.org/mica/study/add-health

At the bottom of the page, the interaction tool allows users to browse Add Health data by standardized topics Maelstrom uses across all studies.

 

Add Health Research on young adult financial independence and living arrangements

Add Health Researcher, Dr. Anna Manzoni, at North Carolina State University used Add Health data to conduct research on parental financial support and living arrangements for young adults interviewed at Wave IV. Manzoni was interested in how young adults become independent of their parents.

She looked at data on 6,471 respondents between the ages of 18 and 32 who participated in the Add Health study. She found that 41.4% of the participants who were between the ages of 25 and 32 still relied on financial support from their parents.

Additionally, respondents who attended four-year colleges and those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds were much more likely to be partially independent in their early 20’s.

While those from higher socioeconomic background tended to be more partially independent on their parents, individuals who attended college were more likely to become financially independent by their late 20’s and early 30’s.

Results from this study also suggest that full or partial independence may lead youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into renewed dependence on their parents later in life.

For more information on living arrangements in young adulthood for our Wave IV respondents, please see our Research Brief on this topic.

Scholarly source:

Manzoni, A. Intergenerational Financial Transfers and Young Adults’ Transitions In and Out of the Parental Home Social Currents 2329496515616822first published on November 26, 2015 doi:10.1177/2329496515616822   Available here

Self-reported health is a valid measure across racial and ethnic groups

The research team of Chenoa D. Allen, Clea A. McNeely, and John G. Orme examined the associations between self-rated health and four health indicators using Add Health data. These health indicators – BMI, chronic conditions, functional limitations, and depressive symptoms – were found to be consistently associated to self-rated health across adolescence and young adulthood, and self-rated health was valid across racial/ethnic groups and immigrant generations. This study addresses a critical gap in health disparities research.

Read the article in the Journal of Adolescent Health: Self-Rated Health Across Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Status for US Adolescents and Young Adults

Authors

  • Chenoa D. Allen, Department of Public Health, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Clea A. McNeely, Department of Public Health, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • John G. Orme, College of Social Work, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee


Scholarly source: Allen CD, McNeely CA, Orme JG. Self-Rated Health Across Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Status for US Adolescents and Young Adults. Journal of Adolescent Health 2015. 
Article available online.