This study aimed to illuminate the implications of COVID-19 school closures for sibling dynamics among Latinx school-age children in the U.S. and to examine family and cultural factors that may have conditioned school closure effects. Data came from an ongoing study of Latinx families in Arizona that collected home visit and survey data prepandemic (fall 2019; T1) and daily diary data during the outbreak (February to May 2020; T2). The analyses focused on 215 Latinx children (47% female; Mage = 9.72, SD = 1.22; 88% Mexican-origin) from 116 families (T1 family income median = $27,600, SD = $24,421). Multilevel tobit regression models were estimated to examine associations linking both T2 school closure and number of days since school closure with daily sibling positivity and negativity. The models also tested moderation effects of T1 family socioeconomic status, sibship size, child enculturation, and prior sibling positivity and negativity on these associations. Results showed that, although main effects of school closure on sibling dynamics were nonsignificant, school closure was linked to more sibling positivity in families with more children and among more enculturated children, and days since school closure was linked to more sibling positivity in families with more children and to lower sibling negativity among those with less prepandemic sibling negativity. Findings highlight differentiated effects of COVID-19 school closures on sibling dynamics among Latinx children whose families have been disproportionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, illuminate the role of Latinx family cultural strengths, and have implications for intervention programs and public policies

Objective: To illuminate family implications of youth’s work, we examined longitudinal links between the work experiences of Mexican-origin youth in late adolescence and young adulthood and father-youth relationships. Method: Using data from 187 Mexican-origin youth and their employed fathers, we tested youth’s (52.4% female; Mage = 19.64, SD = 1.78) work hours and workplace discrimination as predictors of paternal acceptance two years later (Time 1 paternal acceptance controlled), and tested moderation by youth gender and maternal employment. Results: Multivariate multilevel models revealed a curvilinear association between youth workplace discrimination and father-reported acceptance. Moderation effects of youth gender and mother employment in linear links between youth work experiences and youth-reported acceptance also emerged. Work hours were stronger negative predictors of paternal acceptance for sons than daughters and youth with employed compared to nonemployed mothers. Workplace discrimination was a positive predictor of paternal acceptance of daughters but not sons. Conclusions: Findings highlight complex patterns in links between youth’s work and family relationships, an understudied area

Grounded in a family systems perspective, we used a dyadic approach to examine longitudinal associations between parents’ marital relationship qualities (marital conflict and marital satisfaction) and parent–childwarmth and conflict in a sample of 180 African American families with adolescent-age children. We alsotested whether these associations varied as a function of family economic strain, parents’ depressivesymptoms, and parent and youth gender. Results from longitudinal, Actor–Partner Interdependence Models(APIMs) showed significant actor and partner effects for associations between marital satisfaction andparent–child relationships reflecting both spillover and compensation processes. With respect to compensation, on occasions when fathers experienced lower marital satisfaction than usual (i.e., compared to theirown cross time average), youth reported more relationship warmth with mothers than usual. Spillovereffects were moderated, such that, on occasions when parents experienced more marital satisfaction thanusual, adolescents reported more warmth, but only on occasions when parents also experienced lowereconomic strain than usual. Neither parents’ depressive symptoms nor youth gender moderated associationsbetween marriage and parent–child relationships. Results highlight interconnections between marital andparent–child relationships within African American families, the importance of assessing experiences ofmultiple family members, and the role of family contextual factors for family systems processes in thissociocultural group.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly utilize social media for strategic stakeholder engagement. This study proposes a network-oriented theoretical framework to understand how NGOs’ eng...

Genetic factors explain a major proportion of human height variation, but differences in mean stature have also been found between socio-economic categories suggesting a possible effect of environment. By utilizing a classical twin design which allows decomposing the variation of height into genetic and environmental components, we tested the hypothesis that environmental variation in height is greater in offspring of lower educated parents. Twin data from 29 cohorts including 65,978 complete twin pairs with information on height at ages 1 to 69 years and on parental education were pooled allowing the analyses at different ages and in three geographic-cultural regions (Europe, North America and Australia, and East Asia). Parental education mostly showed a positive association with offspring height, with significant associations in mid-childhood and from adolescence onwards. In variance decomposition modeling, the genetic and environmental variance components of height did not show a consistent relation to parental education. A random-effects meta-regression analysis of the aggregate-level data showed a trend towards greater shared environmental variation of height in low parental education families. In conclusion, in our very large dataset from twin cohorts around the globe, these results provide only weak evidence for the study hypothesis.

This study aimed to illuminate the implications of adolescents’ relationships with mothers and fathers for their career development processes and, in turn, their occupational attainment in young adulthood across a 10–12-year period. Grounded in the career construction theory, which highlights adolescence as a significant period of preparation for career attainment and families’ role in this process (Savickas, 2013), we tested the mediating effect of adolescent career adaptivity, a fundamental component of career adaptation, in the longitudinal links between mother- and father-adolescent relationship quality and young adult occupational prestige. We also compared mothers’ and fathers’ roles in these links and tested youth gender moderation. Data came from mothers, fathers, and 236 youth (122 firstborns and 114 secondborns; 53% female) from 147 European American working- to middle-class families. Structural equation modeling tested whether effects of relationships with mothers and fathers at Time 1 (adolescents’ Mage = 15.17, SD = .96) were mediated by Time 2 (1 year later) adolescent career adaptivity, represented by academic performance, sense of control, and self-worth, in relation to occupational prestige at about age 26. Results showed that career adaptivity fully mediated the link between mother-adolescent relationship quality and young adult occupational prestige, but the effects of father-adolescent relationship quality were nonsignificant, though model comparison did not reveal a significant difference between mother and father effects. There were no differences by youth gender. Findings contribute to understanding of families’ role in youth career development and future attainment and add to the literature on career construction theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Grounded in theory and research on the role of adolescent family experiences in young adult educational attainment, this study took the novel step of synthesizing results from prior studies and using a machine learning (ML) approach to address three questions: (1) By incorporating adolescent family experience factors examined across prior studies in a single analysis, how accurately can we predict young adult educational attainment? (2) Which family experience factors are the best predictors of young adult educational attainment? (3) What complex patterns among family experience predictors merit further examination? Based on a review of 101 publications that used National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data to investigate links between adolescent family experiences and young adult attainment, we identified 53 family experience independent variables. We used an ML-based approach to train and test models with these 53 Wave I family variables (adolescent in Grade 7–12) as predictors of both college enrollment (N = 4598) and graduation (N = 4180) at Wave IV (young adult mean age = 28.88, SD = 1.76). Our models (1) obtained prediction accuracies of 73.43% and 72.33% for college enrollment, and 79.10% and 79.07% for college graduation, (2) identified the best predictors of college enrollment and graduation, including family socioeconomic characteristics and parent educational expectations, and (3) highlight nonlinear patterns for further examination. This study advanced understanding of how adolescent family experiences may influence educational attainment and provided a paradigm for developmental research to synthesize existing findings into novel discoveries with large-scale datasets.

Objective: In the United States, underemployment is more common among ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. At the same time, African American couples are at higher risks of marital difficulties than other racial/ethnic groups. This study used a dyadic approach to examine implications of underemployment, as perceived by African American mothers and fathers, for their own and their partners’ couple relationship experiences, including relational love and coparenting satisfaction. The vulnerabilitystress-adaptation framework of couple relationships guided tests of moderation by depressive symptoms, work hours, workplace discrimination, and expressive personality. Method: The sample included 164 African American dual-earner parents (mean age = 40.53 and 43.11 for mothers and fathers) who were interviewed on two occasions across two years. Actor-partner interdependence modeling was used for the analyses. Results: Fathers’ underemployment perceptions negatively predicted their own reports of love and coparenting satisfaction. Significant interactions indicated that the negative effects of fathers’ perceived underemployment on their own relational love were stronger for fathers with more depressive symptoms, and, for less expressive mothers, on mothers’ love and coparenting satisfaction. However, mothers’ perceived underemployment was a positive predictor of mothers’ love when they worked fewer hours and a negative predictor of mothers’ coparenting satisfaction when they had high expressive personality. Conclusion: Implications of underemployment experiences for couple relationships differ across gender and need to be considered in the context of partners’ vulnerabilities, adaptive characteristics and other stressors. Findings advance understanding of underemployment and work-marriage linkages among African Americans, and highlight the utility of a dyadic approach.

Objectives: Parents’ and youth’s personality qualities are associated with parent-child relationships. Given that gender shapes the organization and structure of family life, gender typed personality qualities may also have implications for relationships between parents and children. We examined longitudinal linkages between expressivity, a gender typed personality quality, and parent-child warmth and conflict in a sample of African American families and tested if parental stress moderated these associations. Methods: Data came from mothers, fathers, and two adolescent-aged siblings (53% girls) from 185 families who participated in a three-year longitudinal study. In home interviews, parents and youth rated their own expressive qualities and perceptions of their relationship. Mothers and fathers also reported their family and work-related stress. Results: Results from Actor-Partner Interdependence Models showed that youth’s expressivity positively predicted their own and their parents’ perceptions of relationship warmth and negatively predicted their own and their parents’ perceptions of conflict. Mothers’ expressivity positively predicted their own and youth’s perceptions of warmth and fathers’ expressivity positively predicted only their own perceptions of warmth. Parents’ expressivity was unrelated to conflict. Parental stress moderated the expressivity parent-youth relationship linkages differently for mothers and fathers. Youth’s expressivity more strongly predicted maternal warmth among mothers who experienced low versus high stress. Youth’s expressivity predicted lower conflict among fathers who experienced high stress. Conclusions: Findings underscore the utility of moving beyond biological sex to examine the role of gender typed qualities in parent-child relationships during adolescence, as well as the contexts in which those processes are embedded.

Associations between depressive symptoms and relationship distress are well-established, but little is known about these linkages among Black couples, or about the role of sociocultural factors in these processes. In this study, we applied a dyadic analytic approach, Actor-Partner Interdependence Modeling (APIM), to address 2 goals: to assess the prospective, bidirectional associations between depressive symptoms and marital satisfaction over a 1-year period in a racially homogenous sample of 168 heterosexual Black couples, and to explore whether these associations were moderated by husbands' and wives' experiences of racial discrimination and/or the centrality of race in their personal identities. Findings revealed that depressive symptoms predicted relative declines in marital satisfaction reported by both self and partner for both husbands and wives. Moderation analyses indicated that, when wives reported greater racial centrality, their depressive symptoms predicted relative declines in husbands' marital satisfaction. In contrast, when wives reported lower racial centrality, their depressive symptoms were not associated with husbands' satisfaction. Together, the findings highlight the interdependence between spouses' mental health and relationship satisfaction and the role of sociocultural factors in these linkages.

We investigated the heritability of educational attainment and how it differed between birth cohorts and cultural–geographic regions. A classical twin design was applied to pooled data from 28 cohorts representing 16 countries and including 193,518 twins with information on educational attainment at 25 years of age or older. Genetic factors explained the major part of individual differences in educational attainment (heritability: a2 = 0.43; 0.41–0.44), but also environmental variation shared by co-twins was substantial (c2 = 0.31; 0.30–0.33). The proportions of educational variation explained by genetic and shared environmental factors did not differ between Europe, North America and Australia, and East Asia. When restricted to twins 30 years or older to confirm finalized education, the heritability was higher in the older cohorts born in 1900–1949 (a2 = 0.44; 0.41–0.46) than in the later cohorts born in 1950–1989 (a2 = 0.38; 0.36–0.40), with a corresponding lower influence of common environmental factors (c2 = 0.31; 0.29–0.33 and c2 = 0.34; 0.32–0.36, respectively). In conclusion, both genetic and environmental factors shared by co-twins have an important influence on individual differences in educational attainment. The effect of genetic factors on educational attainment has decreased from the cohorts born before to those born after the 1950s.

To illuminate how within-family differences in achievement may emerge, this study examined sibling experiences in middle childhood as predictors of sibling differences in college graduation. First- and second-borns from 152 families reported on their experiences with siblings and parents at ages 11.80 (SD = 0.56) and 9.22 (SD = 0.90), respectively, and on their educational attainment at about age 26. Significant childhood predictors of sibling differences in college graduation status included low sibling warmth, fathers’ differential time spent with siblings, and perceived unfair differential treatment by parents. Findings suggest long-term implications of early sibling dynamics for educational attainment and provided novel insights into families’ role in achievement.

Introduction: Adolescents' sibling relationships may serve as a training ground for couple relationships given their similar features, including companionship, closeness and role structure. This study used a dyadic approach to examine sibling intimacy and control in adolescence as predictors of young adults' couple relationship orientations (attachment avoidance and anxiety and attitudes toward marriage). Additionally, research documenting the significance of an other-sex sibling for adolescents’ romantic competence guided tests of sibling dyad sex constellation as a moderator of links between sibling relationships and couple relationship orientations in our predominantly heterosexual sample of youth. Method: Firstborns and secondborns from 151 families (Time 1 ages M = 16.42, SD = 0.79 and M = 13.83, SD = 1.14, respectively) reported on their sibling relationships in three annual home interviews and on their couple relationship orientations in web surveys ten years after Time 1. Results: Estimating actor-partner interdependence models revealed negative effects of sibling intimacy and positive effects of control toward sibling on avoidant attachment, and positive effects of control toward and by sibling on anxious attachment. Sex constellation moderated the interaction effects of the two siblings' intimacy reports on attitudes toward marriage: Mutual high intimacy among mixed-sex dyads predicted more positive attitudes; among same-sex dyads, adolescents' own intimacy compensated for siblings’ lower intimacy in predicting positive attitudes toward marriage. Findings emerged with parent marital love controlled. Conclusion: Findings suggest long-term effects of sibling relationships on couple relationship orientations and demonstrate the benefits of using dyadic approaches to examine the implications of sibling relationships.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified >250 loci for body mass index (BMI), implicating pathways related to neuronal biology. Most GWAS loci represent clusters of common, noncoding variants from which pinpointing causal genes remains challenging. Here we combined data from 718,734 individuals to discover rare and low-frequency (minor allele frequency (MAF) < 5%) coding variants associated with BMI. We identified 14 coding variants in 13 genes, of which 8 variants were in genes (ZBTB7B, ACHE, RAPGEF3, RAB21, ZFHX3, ENTPD6, ZFR2 and ZNF169) newly implicated in human obesity, 2 variants were in genes (MC4R and KSR2) previously observed to be mutated in extreme obesity and 2 variants were in GIPR. The effect sizes of rare variants are ~10 times larger than those of common variants, with the largest effect observed in carriers of an MC4R mutation introducing a stop codon (p.Tyr35Ter, MAF = 0.01%), who weighed ~7 kg more than non-carriers. Pathway analyses based on the variants associated with BMI confirm enrichment of neuronal genes and provide new evidence for adipocyte and energy expenditure biology, widening the potential of genetically supported therapeutic targets in obesity.

Background: Even before the onset of age-related diseases, obesity might be a contributing factor to the cumulative burden of oxidative stress and chronic inflammation throughout the life course. Obesity may therefore contribute to accelerated shortening of telomeres. Consequently, obese persons are more likely to have shorter telomeres, but the association between body mass index (BMI) and leukocyte telomere length (TL) might differ across the life span and between ethnicities and sexes. Objective: A collaborative cross-sectionalmeta-analysis of observational studies was conducted to investigate the associations between BMI and TL across the life span. Design: Eighty-seven distinct study samples were included in the meta-analysis capturing data from 146,114 individuals. Studyspecific age- and sex-adjusted regression coefficients were combined by using a random-effects model in which absolute [base pairs (bp)] and relative telomere to single-copy gene ratio (T/S ratio) TLs were regressed against BMI. Stratified analysis was performed by 3 age categories ("young": 18-60 y; "middle": 61-75 y; and "old": >75 y), sex, and ethnicity. Results: Each unit increase in BMI corresponded to a-3.99 bp (95% CI: -5.17, -2.81 bp) difference in TL in the total pooled sample; among young adults, each unit increase in BMI corresponded to a -7.67 bp (95% CI:-10.03,-5.31 bp) difference. Each unit increase in BMI corresponded to a -1.58 × 10-3 unit T/S ratio (0.16% decrease; 95% CI: -2.14 × 10-3, -1.01 × 10-3) difference in ageand sex-adjusted relative TL in the total pooled sample; among young adults, each unit increase in BMI corresponded to a -2.58 × 10-3 unit T/S ratio (0.26% decrease; 95% CI: -3.92 × 10-3, -1.25 × 10-3). The associations were predominantly for the white pooled population. No sex differences were observed. Conclusions: A higher BMI is associated with shorter telomeres, especially in younger individuals. The presently observed difference is not negligible. Meta-analyses of longitudinal studies evaluating change in body weight alongside change in TL arewarranted.

This paper documents inequitable transit-based accessibility to sectoral jobs among population groups with different educational attainment and hukou status in Beijing, China. A cumulative transit-based job accessibility measure is applied and multiple data sources are used, including the transit travel-time data from a Chinese web mapping service and the population and employment distribution data from the 2010 Population Census and the 2013 Economic Census of Beijing. We find clear differences in transit-based job accessibility among employment sectors and among population groups in Beijing. On average, jobs in the finance sector are the most accessible by transit, and jobs in the manufacturing sector are the least accessible by transit. Despite having the highest transit dependency, the low-educated migrant population has the lowest transit-based job accessibility regardless of employment sectors. The disparities are especially large when tying specific populations with specific sectors. Within 60 minutes, the low-educated migrant population using transit, on average, can only access 4.6% of total manufacturing jobs in Beijing. In contrast, the same measure for the highly educated local population accessing jobs in the finance sector is as high as 48.3%. The findings suggest that general transit improvements and jobs and population redistribution efforts, without specific sectoral and population considerations, are unlikely to create equal access to job opportunities. In Beijing, greater attention must be paid to connect the low-educated migrant population to low-skilled and decentralized jobs in the manufacturing, construction, and transportation and storage sectors.

Background The genetic architecture of birth size may differ geographically and over time. We examined differences in the genetic and environmental contributions to birthweight, length and ponderal index (PI) across geographical-cultural regions (Europe, North America and Australia, and East Asia) and across birth cohorts, and how gestational age modifies these effects. Methods Data from 26 twin cohorts in 16 countries including 57 613 monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs were pooled. Genetic and environmental variations of birth size were estimated using genetic structural equation modelling. Results The variance of birthweight and length was predominantly explained by shared environmental factors, whereas the variance of PI was explained both by shared and unique environmental factors. Genetic variance contributing to birth size was small. Adjusting for gestational age decreased the proportions of shared environmental variance and increased the propositions of unique environmental variance. Genetic variance was similar in the geographical-cultural regions, but shared environmental variance was smaller in East Asia than in Europe and North America and Australia. The total variance and shared environmental variance of birth length and PI were greater from the birth cohort 1990-99 onwards compared with the birth cohorts from 1970-79 to 1980-89. Conclusions The contribution of genetic factors to birth size is smaller than that of shared environmental factors, which is partly explained by gestational age. Shared environmental variances of birth length and PI were greater in the latest birth cohorts and differed also across geographical-cultural regions. Shared environmental factors are important when explaining differences in the variation of birth size globally and over time.