No Place to Grow: The Unsafe and Unstable Housing Conditions of Illinois Pregnant and Parenting Youth and Their Children

In an attempt to determine the number of pregnant and parenting youth in need of alternative living arrangements throughout Illinois, the Center for Impact Research (CIR), in collaboration with its working group members, conducted a statewide needs assessment to obtain more information about the housing needs of pregnant and parenting youth in Illinois. CIR developed and conducted a survey of organizations that provide services to pregnant and parenting youth throughout Illinois. CIR's findings demonstrate the urgent need for a statewide focus on providing alternative living arrangements for this population

Food allergies in pregnant women: a study of prevalence in expecting mothers and association with neonatal outcomes

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityIntroduction: Food allergies, the second most common form of allergic disorders in Western countries, have been on the rise in the US over the past few decades especially in young children. As the exact causes of food sensitizations are still unknown, much research has been dedicated to solving the mystery of how and why individuals develop food allergies in the first place. However, very few studies have focused solely on the prevalence of food allergies in the adult population. Furthermore, the prevalence of food allergies in expecting mothers and their potential impact on mother-baby health outcomes have barely been investigated. As such, this retrospective chart review study aimed at comparing the prevalence of food allergies in pregnant women to that of the adult US population and investigated the potential effects of maternal food allergies on perinatal maternal outcomes and infant health. Methods: A total of 595 maternal charts and 614 infant charts were reviewed for expecting mothers age 18 to 49 years old who gave birth at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, NC, between November 15, 2011 and November 15, 2012. Mothers’ data collected included basic demographic information, presence and nature of food allergies, and if applicable, occurrence and length of High Risk Antepartum visits. In addition to basic infant demographic information, the infant health outcomes collected were, when applicable: gestational age at birth, birth weight, 1 and 5 minute APGAR scores, NICU admissions and length of stay, as well as infant death. All statistical tests were two-tailed and p values < 0.05 were considered significant. Results: Food allergies were documented in 5.6% (N = 22) of the mothers, which was not significantly different from the national average reported by the FDA (Vierk et al., 2007). The most commonly reported allergy in the study’s pregnant women sample was seafood (42.2%), and the least common maternal food hypersensitivity disorder in the sample was egg allergy (2.2%). No significant relationship was found between the presence of maternal food allergies and maternal or infant health outcomes. Conclusion: Our study found that the proportion of pregnant women with food allergies was consistent with the FDA-reported percentage of US adult population affected by food allergies. Furthermore, we were unable to establish significant relationships between the presence of maternal food allergies and mother-baby health outcomes

Attacking Nicely: Car Saleswomen Adapt to an Incompatible Role

This is an account of the way car sales women see their world, forge a place for themselves in the masculine environment, and change from novices into successful salespersons. It explores situational approaches evolved by women to deal with ethical issues in the workplace. Although women's values about fair exchange are altered, at the same time they change the way the work is done, making the workplace less hostile. Using categories such as "Innocents,”"Ladies,”“Tough Guys," and "Reformers," this study shows how women adapt to an incompatible status and raises important questions for the future of men, women, work and society

Prepped for Success? Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Teens in Chicago Schools

In 2000, there were 8,153 births to mothers under the age of 20 in the city of Chicago. Forty-one percent of those births (3321) were to teenagers 17 or younger. Research has demonstrated that teen mothers are more likely than other teens to drop out of school and become dependent on welfare. 2 When a teen mother does not finish high school, she is more likely to become trapped in poverty than her better-educated peers. With so many potential negative effects of poverty on the teen and on her child, it is critically important to help the teen mother finish her education while she is still young and more likely to finish.During the course of its work on issues around pregnant and parenting teens, the Center for Impact Research (CIR) has heard from several advocates and service providers about the barriers teen parents face in furthering their education. 3 In addition to helping pregnant and parenting teens prepare for their new parental roles, many teen service providers help young parents navigate through various institutional systems. Some of these service providers reported negative impressions about how various educational systems in Chicago deal with pregnant and parenting teens. Service providers believed that some Chicago Public Schools teachers and administrators were not addressing the needs of pregnant and parenting teens and were inappropriately pushing them out of CPS schools and referring them elsewhere

Helping with Domestic Violence: Legal Barriers to Serving Teens in Illinois

In the spring of 1999 the Center for Impact Research (CIR) and the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health conducted a study looking at the prevalence of domestic violence among teen mothers receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in Chicago.1 In a sample of 474 teen mothers on the south and west sides of Chicago, CIR found that 55% of the young women had experienced some level of domestic violence at the hands of their boyfriends in the previous 12 months. The study also found a strong association between domestic violence and birth control sabotage, where teen girls' attempts to use birth control were undermined or thwarted by their partners.In qualitative interviews it became apparent that many of these low-income teen mothers were experiencing severe difficulties with escaping domestic violence due to a lack of temporary or permanent housing opportunities. CIR subsequently began to conduct research with the goal of identifying the legal and regulatory barriers to serving teen victims of domestic violence

Knocking on the Door: Barriers to Welfare and Other Assistance for Teen Parents

The 1996 welfare reform legislation, which established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, sought, among other purposes, to move recipients off of welfare and into work and to prevent long-term welfare receipt. Policymakers recognized that concentrating on teen parents was an important part of tackling the problem of long-term receipt of welfare: although teen parents represent only about five percent of the overall TANF caseload, historically about 50 percent of adult welfare recipients began parenting as teens. The legislation adopted a new approach for minor teen parents, creating two major requirements -- commonly known as the "living arrangement rule" and the "stay-in-school rule." The first required unmarried, custodial teen parents under age 18 to live at home or in an adult-supervised setting, and the second required that they participate in school or approved training until obtaining a high school diploma or General Educational Development (GED) equivalency diploma.In the years since 1996, some states have reported greater declines in the number of teen parents receiving TANF relative to the general caseload declines. Limited qualitative information indicated that some teens were being turned away at local TANF offices, without having the opportunity to complete applications -- that is, they were knocking on the door but not getting in. Because TANF can have an important role in helping low-income teen parents stay on track towards economic independence, this information alarmed teen parent advocates and led the Center for Impact Research (CIR) to conduct a collaborative survey project in Chicago to determine what was happening to teen mothers who were in need of assistance. The Chicago survey was replicated in Boston and Atlanta, and this report highlights the collective findings across the three sites. In conducting the survey, CIR intended that about half of the respondents in all three sites were current recipients of TANF assistance and half were not

Accessing TANF Assistance: A Survey of Low-Income Young Mothers in Chicago

In 2000-2001, the Center for Impact Research (CIR), in collaboration with other concerned organizations, set out to obtain more information from young mothers about their experiences with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) receipt in order to determine if changes in the TANF application process for teens are needed, and whether the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) is effectively engaging teens in the TANF system. Working with community-based organizations, CIR trained young mothers to locate and survey other young mothers in low-income communities. A total of 601 young mothers, ages 13-21, were interviewed. Summary of Findings: CIR found that many young mothers were told they were ineligible for TANF and left TANF offices without having filled out applications; that those who had applied and were not receiving TANF were in need of education and employment; and that the older respondents -- who no longer qualified for the in-depth case management -- were experiencing more hardship than younger respondents

The Meaning of Animals

This research examines the social construction of animals by a rural Allegheny culture using a linguistic approach based on estimating the set of attributes associated with the words they used to describe animals. We asked 268 respondents to free-associate with the nouns, chicken and deer when seen in a context of other words related to nature. Their responses were coded and the frequencies of of words and word groupings were tabulated for sub-samples of differing age, gender and occupation. Response words were categorized into seven typologies including two affective types. The results indicate that except for possibly the very young, the social meanings of chicken and deer did not vary with gender, age or occupation. The respondents interpretation of living chicken was indistinguishable from that of unprepared food. Their interpretation of deer was broader and primarily one of interaction with a lesser adversary

The force, power and energy of the 100 meter sprint

At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Usain Bolt broke the world record for the 100 m sprint. Just one year later, at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics in Berlin he broke it again. A few months after Beijing, Eriksen et al. studied Bolt's performance and predicted that Bolt could have run about one-tenth of a second faster, which was confirmed in Berlin. In this paper we extend the analysis of Eriksen et al. to model Bolt's velocity time-dependence for the Beijing 2008 and Berlin 2009 records. We deduce the maximum force, the maximum power, and the total mechanical energy produced by Bolt in both races. Surprisingly, we conclude that all of these values were smaller in 2009 than in 2008

Cosmic Bulk Flow and the Local Motion from Cosmicflows-2

Full sky surveys of peculiar velocity are arguably the best way to map the large scale structure out to distances of a few times 100 Mpc/h. Using the largest and most accurate ever catalog of galaxy peculiar velocities "Cosmicflows-2", the large scale structure has been reconstructed by means of the Wiener filter and constrained realizations assuming as a Bayesian prior model the LCDM model with the WMAP inferred cosmological parameters. The present paper focuses on studying the bulk flow of the local flow field, defined as the mean velocity of top-hat spheres with radii ranging out to R=500 Mpc/h. The estimated large scale structures, in general, and the bulk flow, in particular, are determined by the tension between the observational data and the assumed prior model. A prerequisite for such an analysis is the requirement that the estimated bulk flow is consistent with the prior model. Such a consistency is found here. At R=50(150) Mpc/h the estimated bulk velocity is 250+/-21 (239+/-38) km/s. The corresponding cosmic variance at these radii is 126(60)km/s, which implies that these estimated bulk flows are dominated by the data and not by the assumed prior model. The estimated bulk velocity is dominated by the data out to R~200 Mpc/h, where the cosmic variance on the individual Supergalactic Cartesian components (of the r.m.s. values) exceeds the variance of the Constrained Realizations by at least a factor of 2. The supergalactic SGX and SGY components of the CMB dipole velocity are recovered by the Wiener filter velocity field down to a very few km/s. The SGZ component of the estimated velocity, the one that is most affected by the Zone of Avoidance, is off by 126 km/s (an almost 2 sigma discrepancy).Comment: 10 pages, accepted for MNRA