Adolescence is an important period of scaffolding for educational attainment, which is among the strongest predictors of outcomes in multiple domains. Parents who encourage academic success and promote self-regulation may enhance their offspring’s educational attainment. However, parents with externalizing disorders present a complex constellation of risk factors, including low educational attainment and poor parenting, and are more likely to have children with high levels of disinhibition. Previous research has identified low parental education, poor parenting and adolescent impulsivity as threats to educational attainment, but has not examined risk factors for discrepancies in educational attainment among siblings of the same family. Furthermore, studies have not examined the between- and within-family mechanisms that may explain why adolescents with externalizing parents have low educational attainment. The current study addressed these gaps by testing between- and within-family predictors of educational attainment using data from a longitudinal, multigenerational study that oversampled families at risk for alcohol use disorder. The sample consisted of 555 biological siblings within 240 families. We tested whether parental externalizing predicted lower educational attainment through parents’ own lower education, parents’ differential treatment of offspring, and impulsivity. Results suggested that between families, parents with externalizing disorders had lower educational attainment and more impulsive offspring, but did not exhibit increased differential parenting. Within families, siblings with greater impulsivity had lower educational attainment, whereas receiving more preferential maternal treatment than one’s siblings predicted higher educational attainment. Low parental educational attainment mediated the relation between parental externalizing disorders and low offspring educational attainment.

Religion and gender are two contemporary, heavily influential social identity markers that the media engages with. In India, Bollywood simultaneously interacts with religious and gender identity by producing many movies on Hindu-Muslim inter-religious romantic relationships in the twenty-first century. Bollywood’s Hindu-Muslim romance movies are stories with a central focus on a romantic relationship in which one lover is Hindu and the second is Muslim. The masculinity and femininity of the Hindu and Muslim characters are not accidental; it is meticulously articulated in every movie. This thesis explores two sets of patterns in the movies: themes in love stories and gender identity across the protagonists. It is important to note that representation of religious identity in Bollywood is highly debated with a special emphasis on Muslim identity since they are a religious minority and the political "Other". This thesis acknowledges that the presence of Muslims in Bollywood is complicated and not black and white, but it focuses on the representation of Muslims that is connected romantically with Hindus.