Academic performance and mental health in university students. A two-year follow-up study of a sample of first-year students at the University of Uppsala 1968.
This paper examines the relationship between academic stream and cigarette, alcohol, and cannabis use among 2,543 high school students as part of the Ontario Student Drug Survey (1987). Students in basic and general academic streams were found to have significantly higher levels of cigarette, alcohol, and cannabis use compared to advanced level students. The effects of academic stream remain significant (except for alcohol use) when gender, grade average, drug education lessons, and pressure to use these substances are included in multiple regression analysis. The findings indicate that the process of academic streaming needs to be further examined as a possible precipitating factor in drug use.
OBJECTIVES--To describe parent-reported morbidity in relation to the psycho-social conditions of the families and to characterize families whose children are frequently ill. DESIGN--The parent-reported morbidity in a two-month prospective period, and the psychosocial conditions of the families were registered by means of a questionnaire. The conditioned probability of parents' reporting an episode of illness was estimated by means of logistic regression analysis, taking the psycho-social conditions into consideration. SETTING--18,949 families with at least one child under the age of 8 years, resident in the County of Ringkjøbing in western Denmark at 1 March 1988. SUBJECTS--An age-stratified random sample of 1982 families was entered in the study. 1588 (82%) families returned the questionnaire. RESULTS--The parents reported considerable morbidity in their children. The cumulative incidence proportion (CIP) for the period was 48%. The multivariate analysis of the parent-reported morbidity led to the following main results: 1) the morbidity was greatest for children aged 6 to 18 months, after which it decreased with age, 2) there was interaction between the care conditions and the child's age--CIP for children up to two years was largest for the children who were cared for in daycare, while the CIP for the older children was largest for the children who were cared for at home, 3) if the parents reported that the child's siblings suffered from chronic or frequently recurring morbidity, the child's morbidity rate was significantly increased, 4) mothers with higher education reported more morbidity in their children than mothers without this education, and 5) parents with a high perception of the general health threat ("worried" parents) reported more morbidity than did parents with a low perception. CONCLUSIONS--The results made it possible to characterize families whose children were frequently reported ill.
Department of Systems Ecology and Centre for Transdisciplinary Environmental Research, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. potto@system.ecology.su.se
Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems that require flexible governance with the ability to respond to environmental feedback. We present, through examples from Sweden and Canada, the development of adaptive comanagement systems, showing how local groups self-organize, learn, and actively adapt to and shape change with social networks that connect institutions and organizations across levels and scales and that facilitate information flows. The development took place through a sequence of responses to environmental events that widened the scope of local management from a particular issue or resource to a broad set of issues related to ecosystem processes across scales and from individual actors, to group of actors to multiple-actor processes. The results suggest that the institutional and organizational landscapes should be approached as carefully as the ecological in order to clarify features that contribute to the resilience of social-ecological systems. These include the following: vision, leadership, and trust; enabling legislation that creates social space for ecosystem management; funds for responding to environmental change and for remedial action; capacity for monitoring and responding to environmental feedback; information flow through social networks; the combination of various sources of information and knowledge; and sense-making and arenas of collaborative learning for ecosystem management. We propose that the self-organizing process of adaptive comanagement development, facilitated by rules and incentives of higher levels, has the potential to expand desirable stability domains of a region and make social-ecological systems more robust to change.
