The association of smoking with drinking pattern may provide opportunities to reduce smoking among students

There is evidence that smoking and alcohol consumption are paired behaviours among university students, but we know little about how New Zealand students engage in these behaviours. We estimated prevalence of daily and occasional smoking among university students, and associations of smoking with drinking patterns, demographics and smokefree policies of the university. This research was conducted with 2822 university students, aged 17–25, from five New Zealand universities who participated in an online health survey in 2013. Fourteen percent reported they currently smoke occasionally, and 3% reported smoking on a daily basis. Increasing age, living situation, drinking more often, and drinking more alcohol during drinking occasions were all associated with greater levels of smoking. Understanding patterns of smoking in relation to alcohol consumption may help efforts to further reduce smoking prevalence. Specifically, policy makers should consider approaches that de-couple tobacco and alcohol consumption, such as expanding the smokefree perimeter of bars and disallowing the sale of tobacco at premises licensed to sell alcohol.     

Editor's Note

Qualitative Sociology -     

The Father as an Idea: A Challenge to Kinship Boundaries by Single Mothers

In separating parenthood from partnership, women have created new family forms in which men may be involved but not as traditional fathers. Through in‐depth interviews with single middle‐class women, I compare families created with anonymous donors to those created with known donors. In the former cases, mothers craft imagined fathers as their children become “looking glasses” into the men they will probably never meet. These children must rely on the mothers’ imagination to create a sense of the fathers’ view of them. While known donors are not “dads” either, the mothers help these children imagine positive fathers, often through more concrete, personal knowledge, and these fathers often know the children from a distance. In an interesting manner, although children may be created without men as physically present “dads,” women contextualize the donors that allowed them to become mothers through acknowledging the social ways that blood kinship creates families. They ultimately reaffirm certain kinds of kinship rather than challenge them.     

Income distribution in discrete hours behavioural microsimulation models: An illustration

In tax microsimulation models which predict labour supply using a probabilistic discrete hours approach, the analysis of the distribution of income is difficult because, even for a small sample with a modest range of labour supply points, the range of possible combinations over the sample is extremely large. This paper demonstrates the use of a pseudo income distribution, where the probability of a particular labour supply value occurring (standardised by the population size) is used to refer to a particular position in the pseudo income distribution. The superior performance of the pseudo approach compared to using the expected income or taking few draws from the possible set of distributions is illustrated by a simulation example for sole parents in Australia, in which the whole social security system is abolished. The example shows further that even if sole parents could move freely into the labour force, they do not manage to compensate fully or even close to fully for their loss of income when no benefit payments are available.     

Only one pair of hands: Ways that single mothers stretch work and family resources

Based on in-depth interviews with 50 women in the eastern part of Massachusetts in the United States between the ages of 22 and 50 who have chosen to be single mothers, this article presents a typology demonstrating the factors leading to, and consequences of, differing combinations of economic and social support for childrearing marshaled by the mothers. Ensuring middle class lives for their children is a central goal for the mothers. This goal determines how and why the mothers construct specific strategies to complement their ‘one pair of hands’ based on resources they develop: some have both financial resources and a deep network of support (‘good jobs/good friends’), others have either one or the other (‘tapping the networks’ and ‘looking to the market’), and a fourth group have neither (‘going it alone’). Despite variation in resources all the women seek ways to tip the balance of work and family in favor of mother-time, and in the process of developing individual solutions activate broad kin and community networks.