Do agreements between adolescent and parent reports on family socioeconomic status vary with household financial stress?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many studies compared the degree of concordance between adolescents' and parents' reports on family socioeconomic status (SES). However, none of these studies analyzed whether the degree of concordance varies by different levels of household financial stress. This research examines whether the degree of concordance between adolescents' and parent reports for the three traditional SES measures (parental education, parental occupation and household income) varied with parent-reported household financial stress and relative standard of living.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>2,593 adolescents with a mean age of 13 years, and one of their corresponding parents from the Taiwan Longitudinal Youth Project conducted in 2000 were analyzed. Consistency of adolescents' and parents' reports on parental educational attainment, parental occupation and household income were examined by parent-reported household financial stress and relative standard of living.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Parent-reported SES variables are closely associated with family financial stress. For all levels of household financial stress, the degree of concordance between adolescent's and parent's reports are highest for parental education (κ ranging from 0.87 to 0.71) followed by parental occupation (κ ranging from 0.50 to 0.34) and household income (κ ranging from 0.43 to 0.31). Concordance for father's education and parental occupation decreases with higher parent-reported financial stress. This phenomenon was less significant for parent-reported relative standard of living.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Though the agreement between adolescents' and parents' reports on the three SES measures is generally judged to be good in most cases, using adolescents reports for family SES may still be biased if analysis is not stratified by family financial stress.</p

Impact of early psychosocial factors (childhood socioeconomic factors and adversities) on future risk of type 2 diabetes, metabolic disturbances and obesity: a systematic review

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Psychological factors and socioeconomic status (SES) have a notable impact on health disparities, including type 2 diabetes risk. However, the link between childhood psychosocial factors, such as childhood adversities or parental SES, and metabolic disturbances is less well established. In addition, the lifetime perspective including adult socioeconomic factors remains of further interest.</p> <p>We carried out a systematic review with the main question if there is evidence in population- or community-based studies that childhood adversities (like neglect, traumata and deprivation) have considerable impact on type 2 diabetes incidence and other metabolic disturbances. Also, parental SES was included in the search as risk factor for both, diabetes and adverse childhood experiences. Finally, we assumed that obesity might be a mediator for the association of childhood adversities with diabetes incidence. Therefore, we carried out a second review on obesity, applying a similar search strategy.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Two systematic reviews were carried out. Longitudinal, population- or community-based studies were included if they contained data on psychosocial factors in childhood and either diabetes incidence or obesity risk.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We included ten studies comprising a total of 200,381 individuals. Eight out of ten studies indicated that low parental status was associated with type 2 diabetes incidence or the development of metabolic abnormalities. Adjustment for adult SES and obesity tended to attenuate the childhood SES-attributable risk but the association remained. For obesity, eleven studies were included with a total sample size of 70,420 participants. Four out of eleven studies observed an independent association of low childhood SES on the risk for overweight and obesity later in life.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Taken together, there is evidence that childhood SES is associated with type 2 diabetes and obesity in later life. The database on the role of psychological factors such as traumata and childhood adversities for the future risk of type 2 diabetes or obesity is too small to draw conclusions. Thus, more population-based longitudinal studies and international standards to assess psychosocial factors are needed to clarify the mechanisms leading to the observed health disparities.</p

Lifecourse socioeconomic circumstances and multimorbidity among older adults

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many older adults manage multiple chronic conditions (i.e. multimorbidity); and many of these chronic conditions share common risk factors such as low socioeconomic status (SES) in adulthood and low SES across the lifecourse. To better capture socioeconomic condition in childhood, recent research in lifecourse epidemiology has broadened the notion of SES to include the experience of specific hardships. In this study we investigate the association among childhood financial hardship, lifetime earnings, and multimorbidity.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Cross-sectional analysis of 7,305 participants age 50 and older from the 2004 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) who also gave permission for their HRS records to be linked to their Social Security Records in the United States. Zero-inflated Poisson regression models were used to simultaneously model the likelihood of the absence of morbidity and the expected number of chronic conditions.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Childhood financial hardship and lifetime earnings were not associated with the absence of morbidity. However, childhood financial hardship was associated with an 8% higher number of chronic conditions; and, an increase in lifetime earnings, operationalized as average annual earnings during young and middle adulthood, was associated with a 5% lower number of chronic conditions reported. We also found a significant interaction between childhood financial hardship and lifetime earnings on multimorbidity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study shows that childhood financial hardship and lifetime earnings are associated with multimorbidity, but not associated with the absence of morbidity. Lifetime earnings modified the association between childhood financial hardship and multimorbidity suggesting that this association is differentially influential depending on earnings across young and middle adulthood. Further research is needed to elucidate lifecourse socioeconomic pathways associated with the absence of morbidity and the presence of multimorbidity among older adults.</p

Examining PBKDF2 security margin&#8212;Case study of LUKS

Passwords are widely used to protect our sensitive information or to gain access to specific resources. They should be changed frequently and be strong enough to prevent well-known attacks. Unfortunately, user-chosen passwords are usually short and lack sufficient entropy. A possible solution to these problems is to adopt a Key Derivation Function (KDF) that allows legitimate users to spend a moderate amount of time on key derivation, while imposing CPU/memory-intensive operations on the attacker side. In this paper, we focus on long-term passwords secured by the Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF2) and present the case study of Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS), a disk-encryption specification commonly implemented in Linux based operating systems. In particular, we describe how LUKS protects long-term keys by means of iteration counts defined at runtime, and analyze how external factors may affect the iteration counts computation. In doing so, we provide means of evaluating the iteration count values defined at run-time and experimentally show to what level PBKDF2 is still capable of providing sufficient security margin for a LUKS implementation

Fifty plus in Ireland 2011: First results from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA)

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) is a large-scale, nationally representative study of people aged 50 and over in Ireland. It is the most ambitious study of ageing ever carried out in Ireland and represents a step-change in terms of data, knowledge and understanding of ageing with which to inform policy and novel research. TILDA is designed to maximise comparability with other well-established international longitudinal studies. More than 8,000 people aged 50 and over accepted the invitation to participate in the first wave of TILDA, and the majority of these also agreed to undertake a comprehensive health assessment. Contents Executive Summary 1. Introduction - Rose Anne Kenny and Alan Barrett 2. Socio-Demographic Characteristics Of Older People In Ireland - Yumiko Kamiya and Nick Sofroniou 3. Older People As Members Of Their Families And Communities - Yumiko Kamiya and Virpi Timonen 4. Social Engagement Of Older People - Virpi Timonen, Yumiko Kamiya and Siobhan Maty 5. Physical And Behavioural Health Of Older Irish Adults - Hilary Cronin, Claire O?Regan and Rose Anne Kenny 6. Mental Health And Cognitive Function - Claire O?Regan, Hilary Cronin and Rose Anne Kenny 7. Health And Social Care Utilisation - Charles Normand, Yumiko Kamiya, Virpi Timonen and Brendan Whelan 8. Retirement And Labour Market Participation - Irene Mosca and Alan Barrett 9. Income and Asset Levels of Older People - Vincent O? Sullivan and Richard Layte 10. Quality Of Life And Beliefs About Ageing - Hannah McGee, Karen Morgan, Anne Hickey, Helen Burke and George Savva 11. Methodology - George Savv