April 23, 2012

Popular youths drinking soda inspire peers

Filed under: General,Health by Branko Collin @ 12:56 pm

It seems that when young people see their popular friends drink soda instead of alcohol, they are likely to follow suit.

Hanneke Teunissen of the Radboud University in Nijmegen found that “adolescents were more influenced by popular than unpopular peers. Interestingly, the anti-alcohol norms of popular peers seemed most influential in that adolescents were less willing to drink when they were confronted with the anti-alcohol norms of popular peers. Additionally, the adolescents internalized these anti-alcohol norms, which means that they were still less willing to drink when the anti-alcohol norms of these peers were no longer presented to them.”

Earlier studies had already shown the reverse, namely that seeing friends drink alcohol inspires adolescents to also drink alcohol.

Teunissen’s findings will be published in the July issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

(Link: Eureka Alert. Photo by Jos Faber, some rights reserved.)

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August 23, 2009

Unemployed youth to help other unemployed youth find job

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:16 am

UWV, the Dutch organisation responsible for unemployment benefits, is going to train 200 unemployed and inexperienced young people to become junior job counsellors, Z24 reports (Dutch).

The first batch of 100 university or polytechnic schooled young people will start training right away, so that they can get started on their new job on October 1. The economic crisis is particularly brutal on this segment of the population who often deal with this by staying in school longer (Dutch) in the hopes of waiting out the crisis. Youths can get a student loan for up to 7 years.

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