Researcher Aurora Sherman (left) and graduate student Pamela Lundberg use a Mrs. Potato Head toy to study girls' attitudes about female identity and roles. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Sex may sell everything from magazines to perfume, but the effects of pervasive sexuality in marketing and consumer products go far beyond the cash register.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released a report — APA Report on the Sexualization of Girls — on the impacts of media displays of women as sexual objects. It summarized what psychologists know about how exposure to sexualized images harms children and teens — depression, lowered aspirations, eating disorders, lack of assertiveness, unhealthy sexual behavior, dissatisfaction with their own appearance — and offered recommendations to counteract them.

Two developmental psychologists at Oregon State University are exploring the consequences of sexualization for child development. A team led by Aurora Sherman is delving into girls’ career aspirations. She is asking how exposure to the impossibly proportioned but ever popular Barbie™ might affect their career choices. At OSU-Cascades in Bend, Elizabeth Daniels has focused on media portrayals of women in sports. Her studies contrast the effects of sexualized images with those that show women engaged in athletics.

Taken together, their results have implications for parents and youth organizations. They suggest that it takes media savvy and strong role models to promote healthy development in the face of what the APA calls “the massive exposure to portrayals that sexualize women and girls and teach girls that women are sexual objects.”

Choices for Girls

Among successful dolls, Barbie™ tops the list. The manufacturer, Mattel Inc., estimates that one is sold somewhere in the world every three seconds. According to the website barbiemedia.com, the doll’s inventor, Ruth Handler, wanted a doll that would expand opportunities for girls. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices,” she said.

When the APA report came out, Sherman remembers being startled on reading that so little research had been done on the influence of dolls on girls’ development. “If we’re going to have this conversation about sexualization, how can we overlook the most widely sold plaything on the planet?” she says.

Surprisingly, psychologists are only beginning to look closely at how dolls affect girls’ psychological health — their aspirations, self-confidence, body image and mood. And dolls are just one element of the popular culture that helps to shape attitudes and personality. TV, video games, movies, magazines and websites blare messages about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social expectations stem from gender.

“Toys are just one part of the socialization process,” says Sherman, an assistant professor in OSU’s School of Psychological Science. “But they are a very important part. Barbie displays adult features, and girls love to imagine what it would be like to be an adult.”

So, in looking at how dolls affect girls’ career choices, Sherman chose to use Barbie™ in her research. She and her collaborator, Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz, (and chair of the APA task force that produced the 2007 report) designed an experiment in which 37 4- to 7-year-old girls were randomly assigned to play with either a Barbie™ or a Mrs. Potato Head doll for five minutes. The girls then answered a series of questions about career choices in 10 fields, five typically held by men and five by women.

The results showed that playing with Barbie™ had a clear impact on girls’ career perceptions. Girls who played with the Potato Head doll did not make a distinction between the number of jobs that girls and boys could do. However, those who played with Barbie™ tended to think that more careers are open to boys than to girls. “It’s difficult in social science to find an effect with this kind of treatment,” Sherman says. “I was astounded that after so short a time, the girls who played with the Barbie reported such an effect.” The team’s paper has been submitted to the journal Sex Roles.

The focus on youth is a change for Sherman who has specialized in health, social relations and aging. To find girls willing to participate, she worked with Corvallis-area families to explain the nature of the project. “Parents run the gamut from a strong dislike of Barbie to strongly liking her,” she says. “I was careful to remain neutral, so I didn’t inadvertently bias the pool.”

Sherman is continuing her work on the influence of dolls with support from the John C. Erkkila, M.D. Endowment for Health and Human Performance at Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis. Her focus is on the impact of sexualized dolls — Barbie™ as well as Bratz™ dolls (a more sexualized line of dolls made by MGA Entertainment) — on body satisfaction and self-esteem.

Sherman hopes to promote thoughtful discussion about the issues raised by these dolls. “Barbies are here to stay,” she says. “They’re a very loved, more than 50-year-old cultural icon. They’re very engaging dolls. They’re serving some kind of need for girls. So what can we do with kids and parents to minimize whatever the detrimental impact might be? If we’ve got a very well-beloved plaything, what can we do to make it work for us?”

Women in Sports

Athletics can build girls’ self-esteem and confidence, says Elizabeth Daniels, but media portrayals of female athletes can have the opposite effect. They fall into two categories: images of women performing a sport and images of female athletes in sexy poses. “Over the past four decades or so, researchers have studied how female viewers are affected by idealized images of women (i.e., thin, airbrushed, ‘sexed-up,’ etc.),” Daniels explains. “In general, these images make female viewers feel bad about their own bodies. Almost no research has investigated how female viewers respond to alternative images of women, e.g., female athletes depicted as athletes.”

At OSU-Cascades in Bend, Elizabeth Daniels (standing) leads an undergraduate research team of Brent Reynolds (left), Desiree Jackson, Taylor McGowan and Emily Clark. (Photo: Steve Gardner)

Sports is an important domain for youth and increasingly for girls. Since passage of Title IX in 1972, the participation of high-school girls in athletics has skyrocketed. Today, girls comprise 42 percent of all high-school athletes, and about 180,000 women play college sports.

Unfortunately, media often emphasize female athletes’ sexual, rather than athletic, qualities. For example, just before the winter 2010 Olympics, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition featured skiers Lindsay Vonn and Lacy Schnoor as well as snowboarders Hannah Teter and Claire Bedez in bikinis. Swimmer Amanda Beard appeared nude in Playboy. Tennis player Anna Kournikova is the only athlete to be named by For Him Magazine as the sexiest woman in the world.

Daniels speculates that profitable endorsement deals may influence some athletes. “Athletes have limited opportunities to gain endorsements, which are far more lucrative than their salaries,” she says. “The few endorsement opportunities that do exist for elite female athletes might require a focus on the athletes’ sexual appeal. Some female athletes may agree to participate in a sexualized photo shoot because of a lack of alternatives.”

In her studies, Daniels worked with high-school and college-age students. She showed them images of female athletes performing their sports, photos emphasizing their sexual qualities and sexualized images of models who are not athletes. She asked participants to respond in an open-ended format to elicit their opinions and feelings about the images. “An open-ended format opens up the possibility of responses that I could not have predicted,” she says.

Daniels found that both boys and girls tend to dismiss or devalue the athletic abilities of female athletes portrayed in sexualized images. In contrast, performance images of strong female athletes elicited a positive response. Both boys and girls respected these women’s strength and skills. Girls recognized the athletes as strong role models.

Taking Action

Images of women performing their sport “could be a powerful counterweight to the overly thin standard portrayal of females currently dominating the media,” Daniels wrote in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. “As educators, parents, and social activists call for a change in the content of problematic media,” she adds, “there is a need to suggest alternative imagery such as female athletes depicted as athletes. My research provides the evidence that these images have a positive impact on youth.”

To help girls understand and counter sexual stereotypes, Daniels has shared her results with community and professional groups. She has worked with the Bend chapter of Girls on the Run, an international organization that pairs running with information about nutrition, emotional heath and other elements of healthy youth development.

Daniels has expanded her research beyond athletics. She has found, for example, that boys and girls make positive evaluations of images of accomplished women in business and the military.

She is currently examining how girls are judged on social media sites such as Facebook. To date, she has found that girls who use sexy profile photos are perceived negatively by other girls. They are in a tough position, she explains. “They’re inundated with all these media telling them to be sexy and hot, but they are still developing the cognitive skills to understand what happens if they do that.

“We need to have a counterweight to the negative idealized images that create so much dissatisfaction,” she adds. “We need to do a much better job educating youth and families about how to manage media in their lives and to cultivate positive attitudes toward the body.”

Fistula survivors gathered with Bonnie Ruder at Terrewode shortly before her departure from Soroti in March. (Photo courtesy of Bonnie Ruder)

Bonnie Ruder, a midwife in Eugene and an Oregon State master’s student in public health and anthropology, had gone to Uganda to learn about a traumatic condition known as obstetric fistula. It arises when labor is prolonged and the constant pressure of the baby on the birth canal causes tissue to die and a hole to open between it and the colon or urethra. Globally, about 2 to 3 million women suffer with the condition and the heartbreaking social isolation it causes. In Uganda alone, about 140,000 women live their days unable to control persistent leakage of urine or fecal matter, and about 1,900 new cases arise there annually. (See Birth Knowledge, an October, 2011, Terra story about Ruder’s research.)

During her time in Uganda, Ruder worked in a regional hospital in the town of Soroti. She interviewed 17 fistula survivors in their homes and in the offices of Terrewode, a nearby women’s health organization. She wanted to know what they had experienced and how they understood the causes of fistula. This summer, she is analyzing the information for her master’s thesis in OSU’s Reproductive Health Lab, but her eventual goal is to assist Terrewode in educating and treating women and reducing the number of new cases.

“It was eye opening,” she says. “I heard their stories about trying to get to a hospital (to give birth), and once they got to the hospital, being ignored for days. They said that the doctors checked on them and just kept saying it wasn’t time. When it finally became ‘time,’ the baby could be dead, and they would rush the women into surgery. The women would be told their baby was dead, that there was nothing the doctor could do, and they would be sent home.”

It was common, Ruder adds, for a woman to be told nothing about what it meant to live with a fistula or how it could be treated. “Sometimes the health-care people would say ‘come back,’ but if she is really poor, how is she supposed to come back? In the meantime, her husband would leave her, and she would be pushed further into poverty to the point where she won’t be able to come back.”

Meanwhile, a potential source of help has been outlawed by the government, she adds. The majority of rural women still give birth at home with the help of a family member or traditional birth attendant. About 60 percent of Uganda’s births occur in this fashion, but in 2010, the government made birth attendants illegal. “They’re really trying to import the Western way of birth without the resources to do it. It doesn’t feel locally appropriate,” she says.

Policy Not Enforced

Fortunately for women who still rely on birth attendants, it’s a cosmetic policy, adds Ruder. Enforcement is nonexistent. Still, what little support birth attendants had received from non-profit organizations has declined, and women have a harder time getting access to attendants’ services.

At the same time, the hospital birthing system is badly overworked. So-called free beds are available, but to use them, patients must bring all their own food and supplies and have a relative or friend bring them any drugs they might need. To get timely help from a doctor or a midwife requires a “tip,” which is usually out of reach of the very poor.

While she was in Soroti, Ruder worked with Terrewode to identify women with fistulas and to get them treated. “If fistula victims can get to town, Terrewode will take them to the hospital and give them all the supplies they need and check on them daily. They’ll tip the doctor to move them up higher on the list of people in line for surgery. And when the surgery is done and women are ready to go home, they also give them bus fare,” says Ruder.

Although she returned to Oregon in March, Ruder continues to assist Terrewode by writing grant proposals. The group is educating a network of women who can promote sound birthing skills and identify fistula sufferers in need of help.

Oregon State’s relationship with Terrewode continued through the efforts of another master’s student in public health, Lauren Baur from Pennsylvania. In July, Baur followed in Ruder’s footsteps and went to Soroti to assist Terrewode. See a video about Baur’s experience below.

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Cooking and sharing food connect OSU artist Julie Green to family and Midwestern roots. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

In 1997, Julie Green had just moved to Norman, Oklahoma, when she sat down to read the local paper with her morning tea and toast. As she was looking at the column of news from around the state, she was riveted by an item describing an execution that had happened the previous night.

The column said a man, whose name Green does not recall now, died at 11:59 p.m. by lethal injection and that, at the time of death, his legs shook and his eyes became glassy and closed to a crescent. The story ended simply: “And his final meal was six tacos, six glazed doughnuts and a cherry Coke.”

“I was stunned,” Green says. “Of course, I had heard of last words. But I hadn’t heard last meals described in such detail.”

A newly hired artist in the University of Oklahoma’s art department, Green began clipping all the execution notices in The Norman Transcript. Oklahoma has the highest execution rate per capita in the United States, so she often was clipping several items per week. At the time, she wasn’t sure what she would do with this information. She only knew she felt compelled to keep collecting them.

“I collected the menus for a while, and I can’t really pinpoint why — it just bothered me,” Green says. “The meals brought me into this issue. I grew up in a family of wonderful cooks, and there was a lot of tradition with meals passed down through generations. And the idea of a meal whose purpose is not to sustain life, or be shared, but seems to have this other symbolic meaning, just compelled me.”

An Idea Is Born

When she accepted a position in the Oregon State University Department of Art in 2000, she began The Last Supper, a project that would translate her feelings into a public statement. Her first piece was a portrayal of those tacos and doughnuts that had caught her attention in Norman. Expressed through blue mineral paint fired on white porcelain plates, the series now has more than 500 pieces depicting last-supper choices by death-row inmates.

The work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, most recently at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The Corvallis Arts Center plans a show in early 2013. National news media including Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica and National Public Radio have featured The Last Supper, as has Dark Rye, an online magazine produced by Whole Foods Market. OSU-Cascades artist Henry Sayre has included text and images, as well as Green’s narrative tempera paintings, in the 2012 edition of his textbook A World of Art, published by Prentice-Hall.

At Oregon State, Green teaches painting, drawing and contemporary issues in art. In 2011, she received grant support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Its prestigious award is given to only 25 contemporary artists a year to acknowledge painters and sculptors nationwide who create work of exceptional quality.

Green paints The Last Supper plates in her studio in a cozy historic bungalow in Corvallis, which she shares with her husband, artist Clay Lohmann. Every month or two, she loads newly painted plates into a dish rack and drives a slow half-mile to the home of artist and collaborator Antonia “Toni” Acock, who fires them in her ceramics kiln.

Green applies blue mineral paint on white porcelain to create each plate. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

At home, Green is a warm hostess, welcoming guests with a pot of tea and a delicious dessert freshly baked, or a bowl of fruit picked from the trees and raspberry vines on their property. She attributes her hospitality to Midwestern family roots. Born in Japan to a naval officer father, she grew up in Des Moines and received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from University of Kansas.

“My art was always encouraged, but I am from practical people,” Green says. “My grandmother taught in one room school house and my mother taught home ec before she had children. I could sew before I could walk.” Home crafts – sewing, cooking, quilting – were an essential part of Green’s household.

“I never saw the difference between museum art and quilts,” she says. “Perhaps that is why the plate project, and combining conceptual ideas with very basic visuals, is something that doesn’t intimidate me.”

As a college student, Green worked with Roger Shimomura, an acclaimed artist with more than 80 pieces in permanent collections around the world. Shimomura’s paintings and prints have decidedly political overtones that address Asian-American sociopolitical issues. He has followed Green’s development of The Last Supper.

“It’s important work; important because it deals with subject matter that no one else has dealt with in such creative terms,” Shimomura says. “Not only is it original, but it is well-crafted, thoughtfully considered and politically forthright. Good work that takes chances politically always draws attention.”

Green has said in media interviews that she plans to add 50 new plates to The Last Supper project each year until capital punishment is abolished. Does she ever worry that she has over-committed herself as an artist to such an overwhelming task?

“I did say I would continue until capital punishment is abolished, and I meant it. But if I felt like I wasn’t doing the project justice or I wasn’t connected to the work, I would take a break,” she says. “Because this is work that has to be meaningful; it can’t be me just going through the motions. I have to honor the painting and honor the memory of these people.”

Devotion to Story

In order to keep the project fresh and herself creatively inspired, Green spends six months per year working on The Last Supper plates. She devotes the rest of the year to her narrative paintings that are less well-known but for her, just as essential.

“Contemporary issues inspire me, and it comes out in my other work,” Green says. “I need that break from the plates, and I need to express myself in other ways.”

Green’s narrative paintings often have a whimsical tone. For example, in the summer of 2011, she painted a series of iPhones collected from friends and colleagues. More recently, she has started a series depicting figurative imagery on decorated plates, mostly drawn from memory.

One of Green’s signatures is her use of egg tempera, a painting technique that uses colored pigments mixed with egg yolk as an emulsifier. Known for their rich colors and durability, tempera paintings survive from the first century A.D. Green is one of the few art professors on the West Coast to teach this style.

Tala Madani, a 2002 OSU alumna, took an egg tempera workshop with Green and also accompanied her on a trip to tour art facilities in China. Madani is an Iranian-American artist who has gone on to international acclaim and splits her time between New York and Amsterdam.

“My art was always encouraged, but I am from practical people,” says Julie Green. (Photo: Ha Lam, courtesy of Whole Foods Market)

“Visually her work is very subtle, you get wheeled in and suddenly you don’t know what hit you,” Madani says. “Personally I respond strongly to Julie’s other works, her surrealist imagery and translucent paintings with egg tempera have always struck a very strong chord with me.”

Green has just finished another batch of The Last Supper plates, which includes a group from Virginia, the state with the second highest annual execution rate after Texas. When she began the project, she received last meal documentation through the prisons through fax or mail. Now, last-meal menus are often posted online, and she can be painting a plate within 24 hours of the execution.

National Survey

In 2005, she received a fellowship at the OSU Center for the Humanities, which allowed her to delve more deeply into the history and sociopolitical consequences of last meals. Along with a research assistant, Green contacted every state that had capital punishment and asked questions such as: Do you have a final meal? What is its purpose? What are the rules (do you allow restaurant meals, what is the spending limit)? She found many states have a $20 maximum spending limit; others, like Oregon, with fewer executions, don’t limit the amount.

“Many prisons I called said that meals were given for ‘good behavior,’” Green says. “If you don’t make a scene, you get a meal. And others had some interesting traditions. For instance, in Louisiana, your family can join you for the last meal.”

Texas, which accounts for more than a third of all executions in the U.S. since 1976, eliminated last meals for death row inmates in September 2011, after a state legislator called the meals a waste of money. The irony, Green says, is that most inmates have very simple requests, such a hamburger and fries or a slice of pepperoni pizza.

“In part it is because many of the inmates are from lower income backgrounds and that maybe is the meal they want,” Green says. “Many pick comfort food items, things they associate with home. They don’t have time to digest it anyway, and it’s not as if the meal is meant to sustain them. So what they do with it is their choice, I think.”

The OSU Center for the Humanities has awarded Green a fellowship to write a book titled The Last Supper in 2013.

Green is starting a new group of plates on which she repeatedly paints the words “Declined last meal.” That is what the documents she was sent from Virginia claimed the prisoners wanted.

She says it is perhaps best she didn’t know what she was getting into when she clipped that newspaper column while having her morning tea and toast in 1997. Maybe if she had known, she would have never jumped into the fray. But now as meal notices keep coming in from all over the country, the sense of urgency is as great as ever.

“Once I started, and I saw that this was a way to humanize those who have been portrayed as monsters, by making visual something we all share — the love and comfort of food — I couldn’t stop,” Green says. “It opened my mind and made me an activist, so my hope is that this work somehow does that for others.”

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See a review of Green’s project on The Salt, National Public Radio’s food blog.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Like a bunch of teens left unsupervised, humans have been running amuck ever since crude oil first gushed forth on a Pennsylvania farm in the 1800s. Our 200-year-long “fossil-fuel party” has made modern life possible but has fouled the environment and ignited catastrophic changes in Earth’s climate.

“We’re like juveniles throwing a big party,” says OSU’s Allen Thompson, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. “The house is a mess, the goldfish are dying, the plants haven’t been watered. We’ve screwed up everything.”
As we awaken to the sobering consequences of unfettered consumption, we can take several tacks, Thompson argues. We can give in to despair or denial. We can continue trying to mitigate damage by cutting carbon emissions. Or we can begin adapting to our radically altered world.

Thompson doesn’t suggest for a minute that we shouldn’t do everything in our power, personally and politically, to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But, as he notes in a rueful tone, international mitigation efforts have so far failed to slow the trajectory of worldwide warming. Even if nations suddenly clamp down, there’s enough carbon dioxide already wrapping the planet to alter conditions for thousands of years.

Choosing Optimism

Thompson admits to bouts of anxiety about where we’re headed. As an undergrad at The Evergreen State College, where he was part of a “very liberal, environmentally minded, progressive set of young nouveau-hippies,” he first read The End of Nature, Bill McKibben’s now-classic book on global warming. It has haunted him ever since. But rather than succumb to hopelessness, he set about constructing a philosophical framework for at least a limited form of optimism.

Our best chance for bequeathing to our children an intact planet and an ethical society — a “life worthy of human dignity” — is adaptation, Thompson has concluded. When he talks about adaptation, however, he’s not talking about girding seaside towns against storm surges or planting drought-resistant crops (although those kinds of measures certainly are needed). Rather, he’s talking about nothing less than a radical transformation of our humanity. Our current idea of adapting to climate change is too limited for a ravaged world; it’s more akin to “coping” or only reducing vulnerability, he says. Besides, the strategies we typically put forward — exporting new energy technologies, for example, or sending money to poor nations for desalination plants — while helpful, too often are also effective at preserving or extending the very economic framework and consumer culture that created the climate crisis in the first place.

So if we hope to flourish in this human-dominated geologic era (which scientists like Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen are calling the “Anthropocene”), we must reinvent ourselves, Thompson argues in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, a new book of essays from The MIT Press that he co-edited with Jeremy Bendik-Keymer of Case Western Reserve University. We must redefine what it means to be a good human, both individually and collectively.

Ecological Identity

“Adapting to new conditions really means changing yourself,” Thompson says. “The scale of change we’re facing with global warming is unprecedented in human history. It will put a tremendous strain on our social orders and our governmental patterns. It will threaten our very mode of civilization. We have to start rethinking not only our individual character traits but also our institutions so we can move toward a new global ecology. It is crucial that we think of human excellence ecologically.”

In a few short millennia, the human species has altered its mother planet irrevocably. Just as we are the only animals capable of such profound impact, so we are the only ones capable of reparation and restoration. In this fact lies our greatest duty, says Thompson.

“Humanity now has the role of managing the global biosphere,” he writes. “We were neither designed nor destined for this; only the contingent course of history has made it so. … Human beings are now managers of the planet in the sense that collectively our actions determine the basic conditions for the existence of all life on Earth.”

(Illustration: Edel Rodriguez)

Youth development focuses on the positive, but the most vulnerable still face long odds

In 1998, Michelle Inderbitzin decided to conduct a study of youth in a detention center for violent offenders. Almost every Saturday morning for 15 months, the University of Washington graduate student in sociology made the 90-minute drive from Seattle to an “end-of-the-line training school” for boys convicted of multiple property crimes, armed robberies, violent and/or sexual assaults and homicides. In the “cottage” where she worked, most of the 20 or so inmates, many of them gang members from poor urban neighborhoods, had been sentenced for robberies and “drug deals gone bad.” She was little older than the center’s residents.

Field studies in juvenile centers are rare. So Inderbitzin wanted to observe and talk with the boys, to evaluate their stories against the background of theories on delinquency and criminal justice. She hung out in a common room where residents talked, played games and watched TV, taking notes only after she left.

Hallie Ford spent a lifetime advocating for youth and families

Her work will continue to inspire research in the new Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families at OSU.

Find more information about the center.

At first, the reception was cold. Inmates ignored her, later saying they expected her to give up and leave. The staff kept a close eye on her. Eventually one of the older youths, a 19-year-old Hispanic boy respected by the others, approached her and began to talk. He took some heat from his peers, but gradually, others followed, sharing details of their lives, their dreams, frustrations and unsettled scores that awaited them back home. Staff members also talked frankly with Inderbitzin about the futures for boys who would return to their communities as young men with criminal records.

Now an associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University, Inderbitzin has published eight journal articles about her observations and findings. In addition, she shares her knowledge with OSU students through courses on criminal justice and deviant behavior. In 2007, she became the first university professor on the West Coast to lead a class of students and men’s prison inmates through the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which promotes understanding of the criminal justice system.

While Inderbitzin’s direct approach to one of the most troubled edges of today’s youth culture was unusual, her desire to address problems by building on the positive attributes of our children and teens is not. Colleagues at OSU are tackling some of the most pressing challenges that confront families and youth: the development of positive behaviors; the channeling of youthful energy to meet community needs; the lengthening transition to adulthood.

Initiatives span the age range from child to early adult. They focus on issues such as readiness to learn, nutrition, obesity, risky behaviors and social policies. And the newly endowed Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families will foster new collaborations among researchers, families and professionals in education and child welfare agencies (see sidebar).

These efforts are being noticed. “OSU has put together an extraordinary group of people who are at the cutting edge of developmental science,” says Richard M. Lerner, an international leader in youth development at Tufts University. Developmental science tends to look at youth through a “deficit lens,” but he argues that success will come from promoting their strengths. Accordingly, OSU is combining high quality science with good practice, Lerner adds, and approaching youth as resources to be developed instead of problems to be solved. The author of more than 65 books, Lerner gave the first presentation at the Duncan and Cynthia Campbell Lecture Series on Childhood Relationships, Risk and Resilience, sponsored by the College of Health and Human Sciences in April 2007.

Positive and Universal

In 1975, a high school English teacher in Idaho identified what she thought were the common elements of effective character development for youth. “I was idealistic, like most beginning teachers, and I wanted to make a difference,” says Carol Allred, who is affiliated with the OSU Department of Public Health and owns Positive Action, Inc., a national character education company in Twin Falls.

In her classes, she created lessons to teach students to build self-esteem through intentionally positive behaviors. With support from the Idaho Youth Commission and federal agencies (Department of Justice, Centers for Disease Control), she expanded her program to the elementary grades. Five years later, when the grant money dried up, she started her company.

“In the first, year, we set a goal of getting the Positive Action program into 25 schools. At the end of that time, it was in 80,” she says. The company now counts 13,000 schools, mostly in the United States, as past and current clients.

At about the same time that Allred was launching her business, a public health researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago was developing a theory that defines effective ways to reduce risky behavior by youth. His vision: Address the common underpinnings of smoking, drugs, violence and dropping out of school, and you reduce the incidence of all such behaviors simultaneously. Preventing problems before they develop is key, says Brian Flay, now a professor of public health at OSU.

“The broader sociocultural environment influences all of our behaviors. It’s the same with kids. And family interactions influence kids’ developmental trajectories. Bonding with your family and bonding with your school influence all of your behaviors. Not just smoking, not just drugs, not just violence. Everything,” Flay explains.

Flay embarked on a series of systematic studies to determine if such prevention techniques actually worked, and he developed a program known as Aban Aya for inner-city African-American schools in Chicago to put his theory into action. After meeting Allred and learning of Positive Action, he focused his work on the Positive Action program. “I had this comprehensive theory in need of a comprehensive program and she had a comprehensive program in need of a comprehensive theory,” says Flay. Their professional compatibility took a personal turn when they married in 2000.

With grants from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Education, Flay has compared the rate of risky behaviors in schools that have adopted Positive Action with those that have not. He and teams of independent collaborators have focused on a range of school settings, from the inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago to urban and rural communities in the Southeast, Utah and Hawaii. Using data from school report cards, student surveys, teacher interviews and other sources, they have shown that Positive Action improves academic performance and reduces negative behaviors in elementary, middle and high schools.

For example, in a large southeastern school district, scores on the Florida Reading Test improved by 40 percent, and out-of-school suspensions declined by 29.6 percent in elementary schools that used the Positive Action program. In middle schools, the larger the number of students who had experienced Positive Action in earlier grades, the lower the rate of documented “problem behaviors,” as much as 75 percent less. Results from randomized trials in Chicago and Hawaii replicate these and other results.

Positive Action is the only character development program certified by the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse to effectively change both behaviors and academic performance.

“Design the right kind of program and you can change multiple factors that end up influencing multiple outcomes,” says Flay. “We reduce violence and substance abuse as measured by kids’ reports, as measured by teachers’ reports and by school-level data like disciplinary referrals and academic standardized test scores. It’s a rich combination of data that is consistently showing effects.”

The Positive Action philosophy is disarmingly simple, adds Allred. Student success stems from “feeling good about who you are, what you’re doing and how you treat others.” Other youth programs promote similar benefits, she says. Through the company’s educational kits for schools, families and communities, “we’re raising that to a conscious level. We empower kids by helping them to understand that thoughts and actions lead to feelings. Our philosophy is intuitive and universal.”

The Most Vulnerable

As parents know, children’s needs change from one stage of development to another, and the stakes rise as teens approach adulthood. All too quickly an itch for the latest Harry Potter book becomes a request for the car keys. For young adults looking for the key to a career, the global economy poses challenges their parents did not face: fewer manufacturing jobs, a more diverse work force and a more technically demanding labor market. In response to these and other factors, many youth disengage from social institutions after high school (see sidebar).

That concerns Rick Settersten, whose analyses of the transition to adulthood show that, as economic forces grind against personal aspirations and social programs, the support networks for young adults fray. For example, he says, the trade unions that used to protect and support young men from working-class and disadvantaged backgrounds have all but disappeared, along with the pockets of the economy that used to absorb them. So, too, have the loyalty of corporations and the certainty of benefits for the middle class. The “common, collective set of commitments” that emerged from the New Deal is unraveling.

The net result: “You fend for yourself. You’re responsible for your own welfare. You make your own choices and live with the consequences. The rub is that old assumptions about life don’t hold anymore; life is full of new and unforeseen risks. Governments and markets don’t absorb them. Individuals and their families do,” says Settersten.

A professor in human development and family sciences at OSU, Settersten is also a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy. He and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Princeton and other universities have analyzed national and international datasets (the U.S. Census, public attitude surveys and youth development studies) to reveal how income, gender, race and other factors affect the ability of youth to become independent, to establish sound personal relationships and to launch productive careers — in short, to become responsible adults.

“It is simply not possible for most young people to achieve economic and psychological autonomy as early as they once did. Most kids from families with some resources and connections fare pretty well. They just need more support to get there, and they’ll get there late,” says Settersten.

The most vulnerable are those young adults whose fates have been tied to public programs and policies. “Whether they’ve come from fragile families, or they’ve been tied to the juvenile justice system or special education, they are abruptly cut off from support when they reach 18 or 21. If middle-class kids are getting so much support to make it through the 20s, what is the plight of kids who don’t have those types and levels of supports?” Settersten asks.

To increase the chances of success for these youth, Settersten and his colleagues suggest that educational institutions, workplaces, social services and policies must be organized in more coordinated, rather than piecemeal, ways. In their 2005 book, On the Frontier of Adulthood, they propose a policy agenda built on greater flexibility and communication among community colleges and universities, employers and the military. They also point to opportunities for public service and mentoring as critical in facilitating the skills and capacities of young people.

Heroes

Michelle Inderbitzin’s study revealed how difficult it can be to develop solutions for youth who put themselves at greater risk by making serious mistakes. Despite having been caught and imprisoned, many in the detention center saw criminal activities as a way to make money and earn respect. Some told her outright that they would return to those activities after they were released.

Amid such grim observations, she saw signs of hope: examples of creative writing and music, awarding of high-school equivalency certificates, discussions about education and career options. It was the staff members, though, who were the day-to-day heroes.

“It took me a while to figure out that the staff were really raising these kids. They called them their ‘sons.’ It was a little bit of a joke. To each other, they would say, ‘Oh, your son needs you.’ But there was a reality there,” says Inderbitzin.

One picture that she can’t forget is that of a staff member teaching a boy how to shave at a bathroom mirror. “The kid was going through puberty and had to shave for the first time. It was an extraordinary moment,” she says.

The staff were mostly male, including ex-military officers and former college athletes, some with families of their own. They attempted to help their boys by bringing in community college applications and information about financial aid. They counseled them on personal relationships, job prospects and how to discuss a criminal record in an interview. Although cautioned against it, some even followed up after their “sons” were released, listening to stories of frustration in dead-end jobs and encouraging them to be patient and stay clean.

The net result, Inderbitzin has written, was that the staff helped their “sons” to revise their expectations of cashing in on the American Dream. Sociologists have theorized that youth with few legal options for advancement seek wealth and status by any means available, including criminal activity. For the staff, the often-unrealized hope was that their boys would accept less wealth and status in exchange for the relative safety of conforming to social norms.

For Inderbitzin, hope appeared in the boys who showed leadership potential through their intelligence and communication skills. One boy in particular stood out: a “born leader, funny, smart, able to communicate well with the different groups in the center.” Inderbitzin communicated with him briefly after his release but then lost contact and heard that he was back in prison on a gun-possession charge. “What a horrible waste,” she says.

Nevertheless, like many of the detention center staff that she interviewed, she retains an unshakable belief in the potential for youth to overcome even these difficult barriers. “I just don’t understand giving up on them when they’re 16, 17 or 18 at the time of their offense. It doesn’t seem like good logic to say ‘we’re done.’”

(Illustration: Santiago Uceda)

Problem solver and data provider. Advocate, explorer and teacher. Scientists play these and other roles in the often contentious environmental policy process, but not everyone agrees on which role is most important or even proper. And many scientists shy away from policy arenas where they can see their efforts to understand complex systems reduced to sound bites or buried when results conflict with politics.

Special interests and the public regard science as a standard of truth and want researchers involved in policy development.

When it comes to those who want scientists to take an active role in policy, members of special-interest groups (timber, mining, ranching, conservation and environmental nonprofits) and the general public stand out in a recent national survey by two OSU researchers. In a project funded by the National Science Foundation, political scientist Brent Steel and sociologist Denise Lach found that special interests and the public — more than scientists and professional natural-resource managers — regard science as a standard of truth and want researchers involved in policy development.

Lach and Steel also found differences within each group. For example, self-identified conservatives tend more than liberals to be skeptical of the objectivity of science and to prefer that scientists not offer policy advice. Younger respondents and women are more supportive than older people and men of scientists’ taking an active role in policy-making.

For their part, natural-resource managers tend to want scientists to provide clear information and analysis without complicating their conclusions with uncertainty. “Managers at all levels don’t like scientific uncertainty,” says Steel. Statements about probability and uncertainty “drive the managers nuts.”

Science has long been considered an essential ingredient in setting policy. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the National Academy of Sciences, whose mission is to “advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters.” Today, reliance on the “best possible science” is a benchmark for decision-making under federal environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act. Nevertheless, this traditional approach calls for scientists to provide information and then to back out of policy development, leaving decisions to others.

In recent years however, attitudes toward both the objectivity of science and its proper role in policy have shifted, Steel and Lach note in their study. So they explored definitions of science and the policy-making preferences that stem from how respondents view the scientific enterprise.

Scientists themselves see their profession as partly subjective. Few researchers today, they write, completely accept the idea that science produces “a logically ordered, objective reality that we can understand once and for all, even with the most powerful resources of contemporary scientific research.”

Nevertheless, scientists such as Jane Lubchenco, OSU professor and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have suggested that researchers should be directly involved in environmental decision-making. Driven by the urgency of achieving ecological, economical and socially equitable policies, they argue for better integration of science in the meetings, hearings and other venues where policies are hammered out.

The survey by Lach and Steel also found support for public and special-interest participation in the process of doing science. “It’s not just top down,” says Steel. “The literature suggests this is the way to go, ground-based, community-based science. And there’s a lot of support for this from a variety of policy actors.”

• Brent Steel’s Web page
• Denise Lach’s Web page
• College of Liberal Arts
• The Campaign for OSU

(Illustration: Edel Rodriguez)

In 1998, Michelle Inderbitzin decided to conduct a study of youth in a detention center for violent offenders. Almost every Saturday morning for 15 months, the University of Washington graduate student in sociology made the 90-minute drive from Seattle to an “end-of-the-line training school” for boys convicted of multiple property crimes, armed robberies, violent and/or sexual assaults and homicides. In the “cottage” where she worked, most of the 20 or so inmates, many of them gang members from poor urban neighborhoods, had been sentenced for robberies and “drug deals gone bad.” She was little older than the center’s residents.

Field studies in juvenile centers are rare. So Inderbitzin wanted to observe and talk with the boys, to evaluate their stories against the background of theories on delinquency and criminal justice. She hung out in a common room where residents talked, played games and watched TV, taking notes only after she left.

At first, the reception was cold. Inmates ignored her, later saying they expected her to give up and leave. The staff kept a close eye on her. Eventually one of the older youths, a 19-year-old Hispanic boy respected by the others, approached her and began to talk. He took some heat from his peers, but gradually, others followed, sharing details of their lives, their dreams, frustrations and unsettled scores that awaited them back home. Staff members also talked frankly with Inderbitzin about the futures for boys who would return to their communities as young men with criminal records.

Now an associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University, Inderbitzin has published eight journal articles about her observations and findings. In addition, she shares her knowledge with OSU students through courses on criminal justice and deviant behavior. In 2007, she became the first university professor on the West Coast to lead a class of students and men’s prison inmates through the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which promotes understanding of the criminal justice system.

While Inderbitzin’s direct approach to one of the most troubled edges of today’s youth culture was unusual, her desire to address problems by building on the positive attributes of our children and teens is not. Colleagues at OSU are tackling some of the most pressing challenges that confront families and youth: the development of positive behaviors; the channeling of youthful energy to meet community needs; the lengthening transition to adulthood.

Initiatives span the age range from child to early adult. They focus on issues such as readiness to learn, nutrition, obesity, risky behaviors and social policies. And the newly endowed Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families will foster new collaborations among researchers, families and professionals in education and child welfare agencies (see sidebar).

These efforts are being noticed. “OSU has put together an extraordinary group of people who are at the cutting edge of developmental science,” says Richard M. Lerner, an international leader in youth development at Tufts University. Developmental science tends to look at youth through a “deficit lens,” but he argues that success will come from promoting their strengths. Accordingly, OSU is combining high quality science with good practice, Lerner adds, and approaching youth as resources to be developed instead of problems to be solved. The author of more than 65 books, Lerner gave the first presentation at the Duncan and Cynthia Campbell Lecture Series on Childhood Relationships, Risk and Resilience, sponsored by the College of Health and Human Sciences in April 2007.

Positive and Universal

In 1975, a high school English teacher in Idaho identified what she thought were the common elements of effective character development for youth. “I was idealistic, like most beginning teachers, and I wanted to make a difference,” says Carol Allred, who is affiliated with the OSU Department of Public Health and owns Positive Action, Inc., a national character education company in Twin Falls.

In her classes, she created lessons to teach students to build self-esteem through intentionally positive behaviors. With support from the Idaho Youth Commission and federal agencies (Department of Justice, Centers for Disease Control), she expanded her program to the elementary grades. Five years later, when the grant money dried up, she started her company.

“In the first, year, we set a goal of getting the Positive Action program into 25 schools. At the end of that time, it was in 80,” she says. The company now counts 13,000 schools, mostly in the United States, as past and current clients.

At about the same time that Allred was launching her business, a public health researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago was developing a theory that defines effective ways to reduce risky behavior by youth. His vision: Address the common underpinnings of smoking, drugs, violence and dropping out of school, and you reduce the incidence of all such behaviors simultaneously. Preventing problems before they develop is key, says Brian Flay, now a professor of public health at OSU.

“The broader sociocultural environment influences all of our behaviors. It’s the same with kids. And family interactions influence kids’ developmental trajectories. Bonding with your family and bonding with your school influence all of your behaviors. Not just smoking, not just drugs, not just violence. Everything,” Flay explains.

Flay embarked on a series of systematic studies to determine if such prevention techniques actually worked, and he developed a program known as Aban Aya for inner-city African-American schools in Chicago to put his theory into action. After meeting Allred and learning of Positive Action, he focused his work on the Positive Action program. “I had this comprehensive theory in need of a comprehensive program and she had a comprehensive program in need of a comprehensive theory,” says Flay. Their professional compatibility took a personal turn when they married in 2000.

With grants from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Education, Flay has compared the rate of risky behaviors in schools that have adopted Positive Action with those that have not. He and teams of independent collaborators have focused on a range of school settings, from the inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago to urban and rural communities in the Southeast, Utah and Hawaii. Using data from school report cards, student surveys, teacher interviews and other sources, they have shown that Positive Action improves academic performance and reduces negative behaviors in elementary, middle and high schools.

For example, in a large southeastern school district, scores on the Florida Reading Test improved by 40 percent, and out-of-school suspensions declined by 29.6 percent in elementary schools that used the Positive Action program. In middle schools, the larger the number of students who had experienced Positive Action in earlier grades, the lower the rate of documented “problem behaviors,” as much as 75 percent less. Results from randomized trials in Chicago and Hawaii replicate these and other results.

Positive Action is the only character development program certified by the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse to effectively change both behaviors and academic performance.

“Design the right kind of program and you can change multiple factors that end up influencing multiple outcomes,” says Flay. “We reduce violence and substance abuse as measured by kids’ reports, as measured by teachers’ reports and by school-level data like disciplinary referrals and academic standardized test scores. It’s a rich combination of data that is consistently showing effects.”

The Positive Action philosophy is disarmingly simple, adds Allred. Student success stems from “feeling good about who you are, what you’re doing and how you treat others.” Other youth programs promote similar benefits, she says. Through the company’s educational kits for schools, families and communities, “we’re raising that to a conscious level. We empower kids by helping them to understand that thoughts and actions lead to feelings. Our philosophy is intuitive and universal.”

The Most Vulnerable

As parents know, children’s needs change from one stage of development to another, and the stakes rise as teens approach adulthood. All too quickly an itch for the latest Harry Potter book becomes a request for the car keys. For young adults looking for the key to a career, the global economy poses challenges their parents did not face: fewer manufacturing jobs, a more diverse work force and a more technically demanding labor market. In response to these and other factors, many youth disengage from social institutions after high school (see sidebar).

That concerns Rick Settersten, whose analyses of the transition to adulthood show that, as economic forces grind against personal aspirations and social programs, the support networks for young adults fray. For example, he says, the trade unions that used to protect and support young men from working-class and disadvantaged backgrounds have all but disappeared, along with the pockets of the economy that used to absorb them. So, too, have the loyalty of corporations and the certainty of benefits for the middle class. The “common, collective set of commitments” that emerged from the New Deal is unraveling.

The net result: “You fend for yourself. You’re responsible for your own welfare. You make your own choices and live with the consequences. The rub is that old assumptions about life don’t hold anymore; life is full of new and unforeseen risks. Governments and markets don’t absorb them. Individuals and their families do,” says Settersten.

A professor in human development and family sciences at OSU, Settersten is also a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy. He and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Princeton and other universities have analyzed national and international datasets (the U.S. Census, public attitude surveys and youth development studies) to reveal how income, gender, race and other factors affect the ability of youth to become independent, to establish sound personal relationships and to launch productive careers — in short, to become responsible adults.

“It is simply not possible for most young people to achieve economic and psychological autonomy as early as they once did. Most kids from families with some resources and connections fare pretty well. They just need more support to get there, and they’ll get there late,” says Settersten.

The most vulnerable are those young adults whose fates have been tied to public programs and policies. “Whether they’ve come from fragile families, or they’ve been tied to the juvenile justice system or special education, they are abruptly cut off from support when they reach 18 or 21. If middle-class kids are getting so much support to make it through the 20s, what is the plight of kids who don’t have those types and levels of supports?” Settersten asks.

To increase the chances of success for these youth, Settersten and his colleagues suggest that educational institutions, workplaces, social services and policies must be organized in more coordinated, rather than piecemeal, ways. In their 2005 book, On the Frontier of Adulthood, they propose a policy agenda built on greater flexibility and communication among community colleges and universities, employers and the military. They also point to opportunities for public service and mentoring as critical in facilitating the skills and capacities of young people.

Heroes

Michelle Inderbitzin’s study revealed how difficult it can be to develop solutions for youth who put themselves at greater risk by making serious mistakes. Despite having been caught and imprisoned, many in the detention center saw criminal activities as a way to make money and earn respect. Some told her outright that they would return to those activities after they were released.

Amid such grim observations, she saw signs of hope: examples of creative writing and music, awarding of high-school equivalency certificates, discussions about education and career options. It was the staff members, though, who were the day-to-day heroes.

“It took me a while to figure out that the staff were really raising these kids. They called them their ‘sons.’ It was a little bit of a joke. To each other, they would say, ‘Oh, your son needs you.’ But there was a reality there,” says Inderbitzin.

One picture that she can’t forget is that of a staff member teaching a boy how to shave at a bathroom mirror. “The kid was going through puberty and had to shave for the first time. It was an extraordinary moment,” she says.

The staff were mostly male, including ex-military officers and former college athletes, some with families of their own. They attempted to help their boys by bringing in community college applications and information about financial aid. They counseled them on personal relationships, job prospects and how to discuss a criminal record in an interview. Although cautioned against it, some even followed up after their “sons” were released, listening to stories of frustration in dead-end jobs and encouraging them to be patient and stay clean.

The net result, Inderbitzin has written, was that the staff helped their “sons” to revise their expectations of cashing in on the American Dream. Sociologists have theorized that youth with few legal options for advancement seek wealth and status by any means available, including criminal activity. For the staff, the often-unrealized hope was that their boys would accept less wealth and status in exchange for the relative safety of conforming to social norms.

For Inderbitzin, hope appeared in the boys who showed leadership potential through their intelligence and communication skills. One boy in particular stood out: a “born leader, funny, smart, able to communicate well with the different groups in the center.” Inderbitzin communicated with him briefly after his release but then lost contact and heard that he was back in prison on a gun-possession charge. “What a horrible waste,” she says.

Nevertheless, like many of the detention center staff that she interviewed, she retains an unshakable belief in the potential for youth to overcome even these difficult barriers. “I just don’t understand giving up on them when they’re 16, 17 or 18 at the time of their offense. It doesn’t seem like good logic to say ‘we’re done.’”