The Promise and Challenge of Mentoring High-Risk Youth: Findings from the National Faith-Based Initiative

This report, the third derived from research out of the National Faith-Based Initiative (NFBI), examines how faith-based organizations designed and implemented mentoring programs for high-risk youth. Focusing on four NFBI sites (in the Bronx and Brooklyn, NY; Baton Rouge, LA; and Philadelphia, PA), the report takes up three key questions: How were the best practices of community-based mentoring programs adapted to address the specific needs of faith-based mentors and high-risk youth? How did the organizations draw on the faith community to recruit volunteers, and who came forward? And finally, how successful were the mentoring relationshipshow long did they last and what potential did they show

Positive Support: Mentoring and Depression Among High-Risk Youth

Positive Support examines potential benefits of matching high-risk youth with faith-based mentors. Drawing on surveys and interviews with young people who participated in the National Faith-Based Initiative, we found that mentored youth were less likely to show signs of depression than the youth who were not matched with a mentor. This in turn was related to a variety of other beneficial outcomes, including handling conflict better and fewer self-reported instances of arrests. The report concludes with a consideration of the challenges of implementing a mentoring program for high-risk youth and how they might be overcome

Visualizing Complex Roots

Avoiding complex geometric and analytic constructions, this paper considers techniques for visualizing the location of complex roots of quadratic, cubic, and quartic real polynomial functions. This provides teachers and students of mathematics with a better understanding of the nature of these functions and their respective real and complex roots

Locating Complex Roots of Quintic Polynomials

Since there are no general solutions to polynomials of degree higher than four, high school and college students only infrequently investigate quintic polynomials. Additionally, although students commonly investigate real roots of polynomials, only infrequently are complex roots – and, more particularly, the location of complex roots – investigated. This paper considers features of graphs of quintic polynomials and uses analytic constructions to locate the functions’ complex roots. Throughout, hyperlinked dynamic applets are provided for the student reader to experientially participate in the paper. This paper is an extension to other investigations regarding locating complex roots (Bauldry, Bossé, & Otey, 2017)

An Examination of Potential Variation in the Benefits of Higher Education for Health and Wellbeing

Understanding the implications of the significant expansion in higher education over the latter half of the 20th century remains one of the central questions of research in stratification and inequality. Attaining a college degree is associated with numerous advantages ranging from higher earnings to improved health and wellbeing. As higher education continues to expand, however, there is the possibility of increasing variation in the benefits of a college degree. Sociologists have begun to examine variation in the returns to higher education for earnings, civic participation, and fertility. This dissertation contributes to this line of research by analyzing variation in the health-related benefits of a college degree. Chapters 2 and 3 assess variation in the effects of higher education on health outcomes (self-rated health, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking) and psychological wellbeing. Data are drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The analyses rely on an innovative approach to detecting variation in the effects of a college degree that is based in the counterfactual framework and uses propensity score models to obtain estimates of various treatment effects. Chapter 4 examines the potential use of auxiliary variables in the handling of missing data. Missing data is an issue, particularly for the background variables, in the analyses in Chapters 2 and 3. Methodologists recommend using auxiliary variables, variables that are in some way related to missing data but not otherwise of substantive interest, when addressing missing data. This chapter provides guidelines for when auxiliary variables are more or less likely to be beneficial for reducing bias, which were used to inform the handling of missing data in the earlier chapters

The Sequencing of a College Degree during the Transition to Adulthood: Implications for Obesity

In this study we consider the health implications of the sequencing of a college degree vis-à-vis familial roles during the transition to adulthood. We hypothesize that people who earned a college degree before assuming familial roles will have better health than people who earned a college degree afterwards. To test this hypothesis, we focus on obesity and use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results show that marriage before completion of college was associated with a 50% higher probability of becoming obese when compared with marriage after completion of college. Parenthood before college completion was associated with a greater-than two-fold increase in the probability of becoming obese when compared to parenthood afterwards for Black men. These findings suggest that the well-established association of education with health depends on its place in a sequence of roles

Asymptotic expansions for Laguerre-like orthogonal polynomials

AbstractAsymptotic expansion for the Laguerre polynomials and for their associated functions is extended to the case of a weight function which is the product of the Laguerre weight function by a polynomial, nonnegative on the interval [0,∞[

Attractiveness Compensates for Low Status Background in the Prediction of Educational Attainment

People who are perceived as good looking or as having a pleasant personality enjoy many advantages, including higher educational attainment. This study examines (1) whether associations between physical/personality attractiveness and educational attainment vary by parental socioeconomic resources and (2) whether parental socioeconomic resources predict these forms of attractiveness. Based on the theory of resource substitution with structural amplification, we hypothesized that both types of attractiveness would have a stronger association with educational attainment for people from disadvantaged backgrounds (resource substitution), but also that people from disadvantaged backgrounds would be less likely to be perceived as attractive (amplification)

Mentoring Formerly Incarcerated Adults: Insights from the Ready4Work Reentry Initiative

This report explores mentoring as a tool for supporting the successful reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals within the context of a larger reentry strategy -- in this case, the Ready4Workmodel. Ready4Work was a three-year national demonstration designed to address the needs of the growing ex-prisoner population and to test the capacity of community- and faith-based organizations to meet those needs. This report describes Ready4Work's mentoring component; it examines the extent to which mentoring was attractive to participants, the types of adults who volunteered to serve as mentors and how receipt of mentoring was related to participants' outcomes, including program retention, job placement, and recidivism. While this research was not designed to assess the precise impact of mentoring on formerly incarcerated adults, it provides a first look at how mentoring, or supportive relationships more broadly, can fit into comprehensive reentry efforts

A Note on Algebraic Solutions to Identification

Algebraic methods to establish the identification of structural equation models remains a viable option. However, sometimes it is unclear whether the algebraic solution establishes identification. One example is when there is more than one way to solve for the parameter, but one way leads to a single value and a second way leads to a function with more than one value. This note proves that one explicit and unique solution is sufficient for model identification even when other explicit solutions permit more than one solution. The results are illustrated with an example. The results are useful to attempts to use algebraic means to address model identification