Gun safety discussions with caregivers: timing and demographic associations in a retrospective study

This study examined individuals’ recollection of gun safety conversations during childhood, and with whom these conversations occurred. Data were collected using a retrospective survey of 298 college students aged 18–54 from three campuses of a university in the USA. Respondents reported whether they recalled discussing guns or gun safety with a parent, doctor, or school official in childhood as well as what age they recalled first discussing guns or gun safety with this adult. Those growing up in gun-owning households were more likely to report gun safety conversations with parents and to report having these conversations at earlier ages. More affluent youth were more likely to report gun safety conversations with school officials and to report having gun safety discussions with adults in a variety of roles. Few respondents recalled discussing guns with a doctor or paediatrician. Future investigations are needed to assess the content and form of gun safety conversations between children and caregivers.

Adolescents, Third-Person Perception, and Facebook

The purpose of this chapter is to document the extent of Facebook use and cyberbullying among adolescents. It is based on a study theoretically grounded in third-person perception (TPP), the belief that media messages affect other people more than oneself. As Facebook establishes itself as the dominant social network, users expose themselves to a level of bullying not possible in the analog world. The study found that 84% of adolescents (middle school through college undergraduates) use Facebook, and that most users log on daily. While 30% of the sample reported being cyberbullied, only 12.5% quit using the site and only 18% told a parent or school official. Despite heavy use and exposure, adolescents exhibit TPP, believing others are more likely to be negatively affected by Facebook use. A range of self-protective behaviors from precautionary (deleting or blocking abusive users) to reactionary (quitting Facebook) were related to decreased degrees of TPP. Implications for prevention education are discussed.

“‘Her Chinese Attended to Almost Everything’: Relationships of Power in the Hackett Medical College for Women, Guangzhou, China, 1901–1915”

This essay uses a 1915 crisis at the American Presbyterian Hackett Medical College for Women in Guangzhou, China as a lens to explore the level of control Chinese women, who were known as “assistants,” exercised at the school. Official literature of the Hackett portrays the American woman missionary physician Dr. Mary Fulton as controlling the college, but in fact its Chinese women graduates largely ran the institution for some years before 1915. Challenging images of American women missionary physicians either as heroines or imperialists, this article describes instead how Chinese women shaped the institution. Placing the Hackett into the broader context of American Presbyterian medical education for Chinese women since 1879, it argues that rather than only interpreting and adapting missionary ideologies, many of the Chinese women medical students in Guangzhou brought their own conceptions of women practicing medicine. In the case of medical education for women in Guangzhou before 1915, American missionaries were partially responding to Chinese traditions and demands. Ultimately, this essay presents a more complex view of cultural transfer in the women’s foreign mission movement of this period.