The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three ...groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.
Many argue that hegemonic gender norms depress boys’ performance and account for the gender gap in achievement. I describe differences in the emergence of the gender gap in academic achievement ...between white and Asian American youth and explore how the immigrant experience and cultural differences in gender expectations might account for observed differences. For white students, boys are already underperforming girls in kindergarten, with the male disadvantage growing into high school. For Asian Americans, boys perform as well as girls throughout elementary school but begin underperforming relative to girls at the transition to adolescence. Additionally, I show that the Asian American gender gap is larger in schools with stronger male-centric sports cultures and where boys’ underachievement is normalized. I speculate that model-minority stereotypes, the immigrant experience, and standards of masculinity that promote pro-school behaviors in boys act as protective factors in early childhood but wane at the transition to adolescence during a period when the dominant peer culture plays a larger role in shaping gender identities. The study offers evidence that the gender gap in achievement is not an inevitable fact of biology but is shaped by social environment.
Background
Small cell lung cancer is a rapidly progressive disease with high fatality. No sensitive and specific biomarker to assist in managing this disease exists currently.
Aim
Role of ...pretreatment serum lactate dehydrogenase as a biomarker in small cell lung cancer.
Methods
A hospital‐based cancer registry was used to identify eligible patients from 1999 to 2009. Demographic data, lactate dehydrogenase level and clinical outcome of patients were collected for analysis.
Results
One hundred and sixty‐eight patients were identified: 61% (n = 103) males and 39% (n = 65) females. Majority had extensive stage (67%). High lactate dehydrogenase (≥230 U/L) was present in 60.4% (n = 75); mean reading 260 U/L (range 148–898 U/L) in limited stage and 470 U/L (range 116–5462 U/L) in extensive stage. Extensive stage patients with high lactate dehydrogenase had lower treatment response rate compared to those with normal lactate dehydrogenase (39% vs 79%, P = 0.002); no difference in treatment response was seen among patients with limited stage. High lactate dehydrogenase conferred a worse survival; mean overall survivals in limited and extensive stage were 8.0 and 5.2 months, respectively, in patients with elevated lactate dehydrogenase. Those with normal lactate dehydrogenase had an overall survival of 16.5 and 8.2 months, respectively. The association remained significant after adjustment for age, sex and treatment (HR 1.8, 95% CI 1.16–2.80, P = 0.009).
Conclusion
High pretreatment lactate dehydrogenase is a prognostic marker of survival in both stages of small cell lung cancer. It is also a predictive marker of response to therapy in extensive stage. Larger prospective studies to validate our findings would be beneficial.
This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment ...reduces children's time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children's time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better "quality" of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children's development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children's development. Stratification by mothers' education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother's education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and childcare. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children's time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.
Time diaries of sibling pairs from the PSID-CDS are used to determine whether maternal time investments compensate for or reinforce birth-weight differences among children. The findings demonstrate ...that the direction and degree of differential treatment vary by mother's education. Less-educated mothers devote more total time and more educationally oriented time to heavier-birth-weight children, whereas better-educated mothers devote more total and more educationally oriented time to lower-birth-weight children. The compensating effects observed among highly educated mothers are substantially larger than the reinforcing effects among the least-educated mothers. The findings show that families redistribute resources in ways that both compensate for and exacerbate early-life disadvantages.
Data from the Worker and Iron Status Evaluation are used to examine gendered patterns in children's time in market and nonmarket work, schooling, and leisure in Indonesia (N-2,929). Boys spend more ...time in market work; girls spend more time in nonmarket work. Work responsibilities increase with age as well as gender differentials in children's time use. By age 18, girls spend nearly 1 more hour per day working and enjoy significantly less leisure time, but the gender gap in schooling is not significant, suggesting that parents and children are committed to both work and schooling. Additionally, Tobit regression results suggest that parents' education, household income, and rural residency are important predictors of children's labor and schooling time.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration policy to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth ...temporary relief from deportation as well as renewable work permits. Although DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. We use administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students' educational outcomes. The data are unique because they accurately identify students' legal status, account for individual heterogeneity, and allow separate analysis of students attending community colleges versus four-year colleges. Results from difference-in-difference estimates demonstrate that as a temporary work permit program, DACA incentivizes work over educational investments but that the effect of DACA on educational investments depends on how easily colleges accommodate working students. At four-year colleges, DACA induces undocumented students to make binary choices between attending school full-time and dropping out of school to work. At community colleges, undocumented students have the flexibility to reduce course work to accommodate increased work hours. Overall, the results suggest that the precarious and temporary nature of DACA creates barriers to educational investments.
Use of the immune checkpoint inhibitors, ipilimumab and nivolumab, has revolutionised treatment in patients with metastatic melanoma. However, these drugs can cause an autoimmune enterocolitis, with ...diarrhoea as the presenting symptom. This is conventionally managed by prompt institution of corticosteroid therapy if moderate diarrhoea (3–6 times/day; grade 2) is present for >5 days or if diarrhoea is severe (>6 times/day; grade 3). We report a case of steroid-dependent ipilimumab-induced colitis successfully treated with vedolizumab (an inhibitor of memory T-cell trafficking to the gut), after which complete withdrawal of corticosteroid was achieved. Hence, vedolizumab warrants further evaluation as a potential novel treatment of ipilimumab-induced colitis.
A growing literature examines the impact of immigration and law enforcement on undocumented immigrants and their communities, but these studies are limited by the lack of reliable data on ...documentation status and their focus on federal immigration enforcement. Leveraging administrative student data from the City University of New York (CUNY) that reliably identify about 13,000 undocumented students among more than 350,000 first-year students, this article examines whether local policing practices that do not ostensibly target undocumented immigrants can affect the educational outcomes of undocumented young adults. Focusing on police stops around university campuses under the New York City Police Department’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program, our findings show a substantial negative effect of police stops around campus on course credits for undocumented men but no impact on GPA or on the likelihood of receiving zero credits in the following term (stop-out). The negative effect is larger for Black and South Asian undocumented young men, groups that experience heightened surveillance by the local police. In contrast, campus police stops have little effect on documented students or undocumented women. The results illustrate how local policing practices, even in so-called sanctuary cities, can have chilling effects on undocumented groups with important implications for the links between the criminal justice system, immigration, and social inequality.
Abstract
A sizable portion of the undocumented population in the US is Chinese but they are an understudied group. We analyze secondary literature and policies to understand undocumented Chinese ...immigration in its historical and contemporary contexts and draw on interviews with undocumented migrants, community organizers, social workers, and others working in the Chinese community in New York City, as well as participant observation of community events, to analyze how illegality is constructed and experienced by undocumented Chinese migrants. We show how restrictive immigration policies exclude most Chinese migrants from legal entry into the US, force many to endure dangerous migration routes and bind Chinese migrants’ experience of illegality with asylum seeking. The asylum regime is putatively humanitarian but inflicts legal violence and diverts efforts away from collective organizing for rights-based remedies towards debt-fueled migration and asylum seeking, a process that keeps migrants in lengthy periods of legal precarity and reproduces national and global inequalities. Our study contributes to the literature on migrant illegality in sociology that is primarily based on the experiences of Latinx migrants by highlighting the continuities and unique features of legal violence experienced by undocumented Chinese.
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