The propensity score is the probability of treatment assignment conditional on observed baseline characteristics. The propensity score allows one to design and analyze an observational (nonrandomized) study so that it mimics some of the particular characteristics of a randomized controlled trial. In particular, the propensity score is a balancing score: conditional on the propensity score, the distribution of observed baseline covariates will be similar between treated and untreated subjects. I describe 4 different propensity score methods: matching on the propensity score, stratification on the propensity score, inverse probability of treatment weighting using the propensity score, and covariate adjustment using the propensity score. I describe balance diagnostics for examining whether the propensity score model has been adequately specified. Furthermore, I discuss differences between regression-based methods and propensity score-based methods for the analysis of observational data. I describe different causal average treatment effects and their relationship with propensity score analyses.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00273171.2011.568786

An Introduction to Propensity Score Methods for Reducing the Effects of Confounding in Observational Studies

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Erik Eriksen is a remarkable individual. He has no college degrees yet is Professor of Human Development at Harvard University. He came to psychology via art, which explains why the reader will find him painting contexts and backgrounds rather than stating dull facts and concepts. He has been a training psychoanalyst for many years as well as a perceptive observer of cultural and social settings and their effect on growing up. This is not just a book on childhood. It is a panorama of our society. Anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis are scrutinized under the psychoanalytic magnifying glass. The material is well written and devoid of technical jargon. The theme of the volume is that it is human to have a long childhood which will leave a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in man. Primitive groups and

Childhood and Society.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/5/110/206.full.pdf

The american psychological association.

The peak age of onset for many psychiatric disorders is adolescence, a time of remarkable physical and behavioural changes. The processes in the brain that underlie these behavioural changes have been the subject of recent investigations. What do we know about the maturation of the human brain during adolescence? Do structural changes in the cerebral cortex reflect synaptic pruning? Are increases in white-matter volume driven by myelination? Is the adolescent brain more or less sensitive to reward? Finding answers to these questions might enable us to further our understanding of mental health during adolescence.

Why do many psychiatric disorders emerge during adolescence

/pdf/monitoring-the-future-national-survey-results-on-drug-use-4gwg5kzn66.pdf

Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2017: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use

/pdf/monitoring-the-future-national-survey-results-on-drug-use-31nsfr6nki.pdf

Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2018: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use.

Objective:Little consensus exists regarding the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and substance use. This study examined the associations of three indicators of family SES during childhood—income, wealth, and parental education—with smoking, alcohol use, and marijuana use during young adulthood.Method:Data were obtained from the national Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey of U.S. families that incorporates data from parents and their children. In 2005 and 2007, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics was supplemented with two waves of Transition into Adulthood data drawn from a national sample of young adults, 18–23 years old. Data from the young adults (N = 1,203; 66.1% White; 51.5% female) on their current use of alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana were used as outcome variables in logistic regressions. Socioeconomic background was calculated from parental reports of education, wealth, and income during the respondent's childhood (birth through age 17 years).Results:Smoking in young adulth...

/pdf/socioeconomic-status-and-substance-use-among-young-adults-a-40u65fx080.pdf

Socioeconomic Status and Substance Use Among Young Adults: A Comparison Across Constructs and Drugs

/pdf/monitoring-the-future-national-survey-results-on-drug-use-555u23vlx0.pdf

Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2019: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use

/pdf/monitoring-the-future-national-survey-results-on-drug-use-5b58lv55x1.pdf

Megan E. Patrick

Papers

Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2017: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use

Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2018: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use.

Socioeconomic Status and Substance Use Among Young Adults: A Comparison Across Constructs and Drugs

Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2019: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use

Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2018: Volume II, college students and adults ages 19-60