I wouldn't, but you can: Attitudes toward interracial relationships.

Using the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we study Whites' attitudes towards dating, cohabiting with, marrying, and having children with African Americans and Asian Americans. We find that 29% of White respondents reject all types of relationships with both groups whereas 31% endorse all types. Second, Whites are somewhat less willing to marry and bear children interracially than to date interracially. These attitudes and behaviors are related to warmth toward racial outgroups, political conservatism, age, gender, education, and region. Third, White women are likely to approve of interracial relationships for others but not themselves, while White men express more willingness to engage in such relationships personally, particularly with Asians. However, neither White men nor White women are very likely to actually engage in interracial relationships. Thus, positive globalattitudes toward interracial relationships do not translate into high rates of actual interracial cohabitation or marriage.

Some ways in which neighborhoods, nuclear families, friendship groups, and schools jointly affect changes in early adolescent development.

This study assessed some ways in which schools, neighborhoods, nuclear families, and friendship groups jointly contribute to positive change during early adolescence. For each context, existing theory was used to develop a multiattribute index that should promote successful development. Descriptive analyses showed that the four resulting context indices were only modestly intercorrelated at the individual student level (N = 12,398), but clustered more tightly at the school and neighborhood levels (N = 23 and 151 respectively). Only for aggregated units did knowing the developmental capacity of any one context strongly predict the corresponding capacity of the other contexts. Analyses also revealed that each context facilitated individual change in a success index that tapped into student academic performance, mental health, and social behavior. However, individual context effects were only modest in size over the 19 months studied and did not vary much by context. The joint influence of all four contexts was cumulatively large, however, and because it was generally additive in form, no constellation of contexts was identified whose total effect reliably surpassed the sum of its individual context main effects. These results suggest that achieving significant population changes in multidimensional student growth during early adolescence most likely requires both theory and interventions that are explicitly pan-contextual.