The purpose of this study was to evaluate a brief, web-based alcohol prevention intervention program as a universal approach to addressing the range of alcohol behaviors present on college campuses. The sample of freshman college students recruited from Spit for Science (Dick et al., 2014) included 153 intervention participants, and 151 control participants matched on demographics and baseline alcohol variables. Hierarchical multiple regression, logistic regression, and moderated multiple regression were used to compare intervention and control participants on post-intervention alcohol variables. Treatment predicted lower alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptoms, particularly among baseline drinkers. For non-drinkers, the intervention was associated with a decreased likelihood of alcohol initiation. Family history moderated the intervention’s effect on drinks per occasion and AUD symptoms, with family history positive individuals responding better to the intervention. Readiness-to-change and concern for one’s drinking were not supported as moderators, suggesting more research is needed to identify mechanisms of change.

Orientador: Dora Isabel Paiva da Costa / Resumo: Esta dissertação propôs alargar os horizontes sobre a historiografia da imigração italiana no estado de São Paulo, a partir do estudo do caso do município de Franca entre 1900 e 1920. O uso intensivo das fontes paroquiais, registros de casamento e batizado, apoiado no método de Reconstituição de Famílias, revelou particularidades da dinâmica populacional desse importante contingente de imigrantes, atraídos inicialmente para a produção de café e depois, gradativamente, articulados como proprietários rurais ou em atividades do mundo urbano. A união entre a Demografia Histórica e a História da Família, apoiada em análises quantitativas e microanalíticas, propiciou conhecer as práticas matrimoniais e as teias de compadrio que se mostraram inicialmente bastante fechadas a escolhas endogâmicas, pautadas por uma identidade étnica, seguida, progressivamente por uma desconstrução dessa fronteira social. Esse comportamento permitiu aos italianos recriarem, na terra de destino, uma estrutura familiar e social, parecida com a que deixaram para trás em seu país de origem. / Abstract: This master's degree dissertation proposed to broaden the horizons on the historiography of Italian immigration in the state of São Paulo, from the study of the case of the municipality of Franca between 1900 and 1920. The intensive use of parochial sources, marriage and baptism records, supported by the method of Reconstitution of Families, revealed particularities of the population dynamics of this important contingent of immigrants, initially attracted to coffee production and then, gradually, articulated as rural owners or in activities of the urban world. The join between Historical Demography and Family History, supported by quantitative and microanalytical analyzes, allowed us to know the matrimonial practices and the webs of compadrio that were initially very closed to inbred choices, based on an ethnic identity, followed, progressively by a deconstruction of this social frontier. This behavior allowed the Italians to recreate, in the land of destiny, a family and social structure, similar to that left behind in their country of origin. / Mestre

The form I have chosen for this dissertation is fiction-of a certain kind- that incorporates historical detail, family history, and popular mythology of the Western Australian community. Through the details of family and social history, I aim to tell another version of settlement of Perth from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This story belongs to my family, starting with great-grandparents who travelled from London to Australia in the 185Os: one as a convict, one a free settler; both were Jewish, and the convict was Polish.The writing is textured with forgotten voices, is self-reflexive, and tackles the paradoxes involved in telling stories from within the family I belong to, one that resists telling its own stories because of shame and the lack of an authoritative, or socially given, voice. From family history to social history, my interest is in the material that sits on the margins: the unspoken and generally unwritten histories of people on the edges of this society. This material, which is not recorded or spoken, nonetheless "speaks" a shame that shapes the ever-developing identity of a family and a community.The work is informed by feminist ideas about voice and the hierarchy which licenses select people in our society to speak. Relying on the varied materials that sit between historical writing and personal memories, it follows evidence, both written and oral, recognising how malleable memory can be. One of my purposes is to explore ideas about memory, from the individual act of memory to its transmutation into collective memory-to recover, recuperate, and explore what is involved in forgetting and remembering, and do this through a layering of stories, of voices, of form.

Genealogical Family Historians conduct research in order to reconstruct genealogical families, through the application of a rigorous methodology: weighing the evidence for placing each individual in a family group, linking family groups of the past and making contact with kin of the present. Genealogical Family Historians trace the movements and migrations of identified individuals and family groups; and study the local, national and international social settings of lives lived in families and households in different times and places, over many generations. A large worldwide Community of Practice with many constituent groups, including the New Zealand Society of Genealogists Incorporated, has formed itself around this research activity. In this transdisciplinary study focused on social learning, I have explored and analysed the domain, the practice and the community of Genealogical Family Historians researching in and from Aotearoa-New Zealand during the past 50 years. Genealogical Family Historians meet formally and informally, in small groups or at large conferences to pursue their self-directed learning. The collaborative practice includes publishing and teaching; and the locating, preserving and indexing of records. Many conduct research and communicate with others in the new world of cyberspace. My overarching research question has been: where is the future place for this scholarly discourse? My approach to this study is transdisciplinary: my point-of-view is above and across departments and disciplines. The ethos and vision of transdisciplinarity is attained only through existing disciplines, and transdisciplinary research has the potential to contribute to those disciplines, as I demonstrate in this thesis. The transdisciplinary scholarly discourse of Genealogical Family History owes much to the disciplines of history, geography and sociology; and draws on biology, law, religious studies, linguistics, demography, computer science and information technology. I have also drawn on understandings from my own prior and concurrent disciplinary knowledge and experience for this study. Other Genealogical Family Historians bring different disciplinary understandings to the discourse that is Genealogical Family History. My positionality is that of an insider, an involved member of the Community of Practice for many years. In this study, I have allowed my key informants to speak with their own voices; and I have sought illustration and evidence from documentation and observation in the wider Genealogical Family History Community, past and present. I have used enhanced reflection on my own practice in my analysis and in case studies. This study demonstrates how the Community of Practice has played an important role in developing a transdisciplinary mode of inquiry and suggests that there are some generic features of the field and practice of Genealogical Family History that form the substance of a transdisciplinary discourse ready to take its place in academia.

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canadian males, and is the third most common cause of cancer related deaths with decreasing mortality in men. Previous studies have suggested that an increased risk of prostate cancer among men may be associated with rural environment. The etiology of prostate cancer is not precisely known among men in rural Saskatchewan. We investigated the prevalence of prostate cancer and the putative relationship between rural exposures (occupational i.e. farming and environmental), personal smoking history, family history of cancer and prostate cancer. A baseline mail out survey was conducted in 2010-2011 of 11,982 households located in four geographic regions (South West, South East, North West, and North East) of Saskatchewan, Canada. Completed questionnaires were obtained from 4,624 households (8,261 individuals). The questionnaires collected information on individual (demographic factors, exposure to pesticides including insecticides, herbicides and fungicides) and contextual (household characteristics such as income, smoking) determinants from a rural population. In total 2,938 males (114 prostate cancer cases) were included for this analysis who were older than 45 years. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the relationship between independent variables and prostate cancer. Among prostate cancer cases, 46% of men lived on farms of rural Saskatchewan. The age standardized prevalence of prostate cancer was 3.32% (3.81% (n=52) and 2.95% (n=61) among farm and non-farm resident men). Farming job and farming duration did not have a statistically significant association with prostate cancer. A trend was observed for men who had work place exposure to insecticides and fungicides collectively and radiation to have an increased risk in comparison to men without these exposures. Personal smoking history, history of smoking pack years and family history of cancer modified the relationship between residence and prostate cancer. Age of an individual (≥ 65 years) was the strongest and most consistent risk factor of prostate cancer. Other factors such as marital status, household income adequacy, history of cardiovascular disease may also be associated with prostate cancer. The results may help research professionals by directing the focus of their research towards rural population examining prostate cancer.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between several aspects of family environment and adolescent substance use. Participants included 372 (M = 15.45 years, range = 15-17) adolescent males with and without a paternal history of Substance Use Disorder (SUD). Participants completed measures of family functioning, family communication, parentadolescent communication, living arrangement, temperament, and substance use. Results indicated that family functioning and communication predicted a significant reduction in the number of drugs used, frequency of drug use, and problems associated with drug use beyond the effects of demographic covariates. Additionally, temperament and family history of SUD were examined as moderators of the associations between family environment and adolescent substance use. Neither temperament nor family history of SUD significantly altered these relationships. The results of this study highlight the importance of elucidating family environment and the role it may play in prevention and interventions efforts for adolescent substance use.

Cord blood IgE has previously been studied as a possible predictor of asthma and allergic diseases. Results from different studies have been contradictory, and most have focused on high-risk infants and early infancy. Few studies have followed their study population into adulthood. This study assessed whether cord blood IgE levels and a family history of asthma were associated with, and could predict, asthma medication and allergy-related respiratory symptoms in adults. A follow-up was carried out in a Swedish birth cohort comprising 1701 consecutively born children. In all, 1661 individuals could be linked to the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register and the Medical Birth Register, and 1227 responded to a postal questionnaire. Cord blood IgE and family history of asthma were correlated with reported respiratory symptoms and dispensed asthma medication at 32–34 years. Elevated cord blood IgE was associated with a two- to threefold increased risk of pollen-induced respiratory symptoms and dispensed anti-inflammatory asthma medication. Similarly, a family history of asthma was associated with an increased risk of pollen-induced respiratory symptoms and anti-inflammatory medication. However, only 8% of the individuals with elevated cord blood IgE or a family history of asthma in infancy could be linked to current dispensation of anti-inflammatory asthma medication at follow-up. Elevated cord blood IgE and a positive family history of asthma were associated with reported respiratory symptoms and dispensed asthma medication in adulthood, but their predictive power was poor in this long-time follow-up. / <p>The status of this article was on the day of the defence date <em>Manuscript</em>.</p>

Genetic association analyses have successfully identified thousands of genetic variants contributing to complex disease susceptibility. However, these discoveries do not explain the full heritability of many diseases, due to the limited statistical power to detect loci with small effects, especially in regions with rare variants. The development of new and powerful methods is necessary to fully characterize the underlying genetic basis of complex diseases. Family history (FH) contains information on the disease status of un-genotyped relatives, which is related to the genotypes of probands at disease loci. Exploiting available FH in relatives could potentially enhance the ability to identify associations by increasing sample size. Many studies have very low power for genetic research in late-onset diseases because younger participants do not contribute a sufficient number of cases and older patients are more likely deceased without genotypes. Genetic association studies relying on cases and controls need to progress by incorporating additional information from FH to expand genetic research. This dissertation overcomes these challenges and opens up a new paradigm in genetic research. The first chapter summarizes relevant methods used in this dissertation. In the second chapter, we develop novel methods to exploit the availability of FH in aggregation unit-based test, which have greater power than other existing methods that do not incorporate FH, while maintaining a correct type I error. In the third chapter, we develop methods to exploit FH while adjusting for relatedness using the generalized linear mixed effect models. Such adjustment allows the methods to have well-controlled type I error and maintain the highest sample size because there is no need to restrict the analysis to an unrelated subset in family studies. We demonstrate the flexibility and validity of the methods to incorporate FH from various relatives. The methods presented in the fourth chapter overcome the issue of inflated type I error caused by extremely unbalanced case-control ratio. We propose robust versions of the methods developed in the second and third chapters, which can provide more accurate results for unbalanced study designs. Availability of these novel methods will facilitate the identification of rare variants associated with complex traits.

This paper discusses the lessons learned by our collaborative, transdisciplinary team while developing a pilot/demonstration educational health campaign geared toward underserved communities in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area. The objective of the current study was to determine the feasibility of a campaign to raise awareness of the association between family history and cancer risk and to inform individuals of the availability of Jameslink, an online familial cancer risk assessment tool. The research team included members of The Ohio State University Primary Care Research Institute, which includes a unique combination of expertise in Genetics, Behavioral Science, Social and Health Psychology, Communication, Medicine, and Methodology. The experience of the team in developing university and community partnerships, identifying stakeholders and formulating campaign messages is described. Groups who aided in this process as well as the perspectives they brought to the project are discussed. The lessons learned may be helpful to those developing similar community health projects.

This study investigated the associations between (1) handedness (demonstrated preference of one hand for the performance of most unimanual tasks) and neuroanatomical asymmetry (measurable differences in width between the cerebral hemispheres) and (2) familial history of handedness (the presence of a left-handed sibling or parent of a right-handed subject) as an intervening factor in the relation between handedness and neuroanatomical asymmetry. Width measurements of the brain were derived from computerized tomographic ( CT) films and grouped in to categories by hand preference (measured by the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory) and family history. The measurements of right (n=68), right with left-· handed relatives (n=24), and left-handed (n=16) groups were then compared by width and other transformations of the brain measurements. Subjects were adults of both sexes who had been referred for neurologic examination and were diagnosed as free of major distorting brain pathology. Hemispheric widths were compared by group, as ratios (left÷right) and as differences (left-right). Analysis of variance revealed significant differences between right-hemisphere widths at three percentages of brain length in the posterior occipital and temporal-parietal portion of the right hemisphere. The two right-handed groups had significantly smaller right-hemisphere measurements than the left group at 80% (p=.03), 75% (p= .012), and 60% (p= .029) of brain length. There were no significant left-hemisphere differences between the groups. In terms of ratios of sides and differences between sides in the same brain region, the left - handed group was different from the right-handed group at the p Handedness appears to be moderately associated with neuroanatomical asymmetry. The differences in sizes of brain structures and their relation to functionally lateralized abilities may shed light on the processes by which each hemisphere becomes specialized to perform specific tasks and other aspects of individual differences.