Adolescents' self-perceptions of competence in life skill areas

The perceptions of a sample of 1061 adolescents of their own competence in a number of life-skill areas were assessed. Three sets of scales were used—those concerned with competence viewed as efficacy in various life areas and situations, those concerned with competence as the satisfaction of goals based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and assessments of the structural complexity of performance on a short essay task. In addition to comparisons among self-perceptions for different areas, a number of major comtextual and personal variables was studied for differences in self-perceptions—course type, school type, state, career aspirations and expectations, major life concerns, age, and gender. There were strong gender differences that suggested that females generally underrated their own competence. The major educational or work contexts reflected important differences in patterns of self perceptions of skill. Differences between those with different major life concerns and career hopes and expectations aligned with course type differences. Finally, there were strong indications that the self-perceptions of competence that were reported formed a strong general factor, favoring the notion of generic over domain specific self-perceptions.Reveived Ph.D. in Socio- and psycholinguistics from La Trobe Unitersity. Research interests include youth and adolescence and social policy.Received Ph.D. in educational psychology from University of Queensland. Research interests include adolescent life skills and learning and cognition.     

Adolescents' self-perceptions of their strengths

A sample of 960 adolescents drawn from the general population was asked to complete a 22-item scale relating to their self-perceived strengths. The mean score for the 492 boys was 14.9 and that for the 486 girls was 14.4; the difference was not statistically significant. There were, nevertheless, differences for some of the items. In particular, more boys saw themselves as good at sport, confident, popular, having lots of hobbies, and attractive, while more girls saw themselves as reliable, kind, independent, and affectionate. Regression analysis suggested that boys' strengths depended upon parent, peer and school attachment, part-time work, and the number of physical activities with which they were involved. Girls' strengths were best predicted by parent attachment and the number of physical activities with which they were involved.The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit is supported by Medical Research of New Zealand. It also draws upon the involvement of several departments of the University of Otago.Received B.Sc. (Hons.) from University of Hull (U.K.). Research interests include child health.Received Ph.D. from University of N.S.W. (Aust.). Research interests include child and adolescent mental health.     

Adolescents' perceptions of the nature of their communication with parents

This study examines the effects of the age and sex of adolescent and the sex of parent upon adolescents' perceptions of the nature of their communication with each parent. Two hundred and ninety-six adolescents aged 13–17 years completed a communication schedule, rating 14 content areas along six process dimensions: frequency of conversation, initiator, levels of recognition of adolescents' opinion, self-disclosure, domination, and levels of satisfaction. Multivariate analyses of variance were conducted separately for each process dimension. Frequency ratings revealed that adolescent females of all ages reported talking more often with mothers than did adolescent males. Adolescent males, however, believed they talked more often than did females with fathers about interests, sexual issues, and general problems. Mothers were seen to initiate more conversations than fathers on a wide range of topics. Mothers were also perceived as more likely to recognize and accept the adolescents' opinions. Adolescent females believed they disclosed more to mothers than fathers, but males believed they disclosed equally to both parents. Males disclosed more to fathers than did females about their sexual or other problems, while females disclosed more often overall to their mothers than did males. Adolescent males were equally satisfied with their discussions with both parents, but females were more satisfied about conversations with mothers rather than fathers. In sum, the results suggest that mothers' more frequent initiation of discussions with their younger adolescents and their greater recognition of their opinions lead to older adolescents interacting more with mothers than fathers.Ph.D. in Social Psychology, University of Queensland. Her current interests are in the areas of marital and family communication, adolescence, and personal relationships.Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Australian National University, with research interests in adolescence, marital communication, and childless couples.     

Adolescents' perceptions of their attachment relationships with their mothers,fathers, and friends

This study explored changes in New Zealand adolescents' perceptions of their attachment relationships with their mothers, fathers, and friends. The main findings revealed that from early to late adolescence: Males and females remained stable in their quality of affect toward their mothers. With increasing age, females utilized their mothers for support and proximity more, whereas males utilized their mothers for support and proximity less. With increasing age, males and females rated their quality of affect toward their fathers as lower and utilized their fathers for support and proximity less. Females had a higher quality of affect toward friends than males regardless of age, but both males and females increased their utilization of friends for support and proximity over age. Further analyses revealed that Pacific Island adolescents utilized their mothers less for support and proximity than European/Pakeha adolescents. Adolescents from one-parent families utilized their fathers less for support and proximity and had a lower quality of affect toward him than adolescents from two-parent families. These findings suggested that substantial changes take place in attachment relationships from early to late adolescence and highlighted the need for research to differentiate between the sex of adolescent and sex of parent dyads in order to examine adolescents' affective relationships effectively.This research is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation at the University of Auckland.Received Ph.D. from the University of Auckland. Research interests are in life span developmental psychology and in the parenting of children and adolescents.Received Ph.D. from the Australian National University. Research interests lie within life span developmental psychology and early cognitive development.Received Ph.D. from the University of Canterbury. Her main interests are in life span developmental psychology and the development of low birth weight babies.     

Writing and the flesh of others

Prologue: Feminism and Fictocriticism in Australia The article that follows makes use of a selection of psychoanalytic writings to explore what theoretical writing on intertextuality so often occludes: that is, the dynamics of the passionate dimension of intertextual practices, by which I mean the fantasies of writers (and readers) that attend the actual practices of literary borrowings, in.uences, apprenticeships, and hauntings—by other writers, by the music of words, by memories. For the author may be dead, but writing subjects are very much alive and embodied—capable of moving and being moved, of remembering and forgetting, of relationships both real and imaginary with other writers living or dead, of love and of murder.     

African American Mothers' and Daughters' Beliefs about Possible Selves and their Strategies for Reaching the Adolescents' Future Academic and Career Goals

The current study combines qualitative and quantitative data to examine beliefs and strategies related to possible selves within a sample of 22 rural African American female adolescents and their mothers. Mother–daughter pairs responded to interview questions pertaining to the adolescents' desired possible selves. Pairs also completed a possible selves Q-sort focusing on the personal attributes, roles, and life circumstances that might be expected for an adolescent's future adulthood. Academic and occupational selves were the most prominent possible selves discussed during the interviews. A mother's exposure to college influenced her strategies for helping her daughter reach academic and career goals. Findings from the Q-sort data indicated two distinctive mother–daughter groups, with one group emphasizing daughter's personal attributes and the other group putting greatest weight on the daughter's future occupations and life circumstances. The relative importance of possible selves was related to the strategies that mothers and daughters used to help the adolescent reach her goals.     

Adolescents' perceptions of the costs and benefits of engaging in health-compromising behaviors

The present investigation examined the costs and benefits that adolescents perceive for engaging or not engaging in two potentially health-compromising behaviors: underage alcohol use and nonmarital sexual intercourse. A number of hypotheses regarding gender, behavioral status, and grade differences were examined in a sample of over 2400 7th–12th graders. Our hypotheses were more clearly confirmed for perceived costs than for perceived benefits. For both sexual activity and alcohol use, there were strong differences in perceived costs between the two status groups, with nondrinkers and nonsexually active adolescents perceiving significantly more costs to these behaviors. Contrary to our hypotheses, perceived benefits did not discriminate between the two status groups. As was hypothesized, girls generally perceived more costs than did boys for engaging in sexual intercourse and using alcohol; students' perceptions of the costs of alcohol use decreased with increasing grade level. The grade trends concerning the other costs and benefits scales were all complicated by interactions with behavioral status. This study supports the idea that adolescents' perceptions of the costs and benefits of various health-compromising behaviors are related to gender, age, and the behaviors themselves. The findings further indicate that the costs adolescents perceive are more important than the perceived benefits for understanding why some adolescents engage in these behaviors and others do not.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations, Seattle, Washington, November 1990.Received Ph.D from Cornell University in developmental psychology. Research interests include adolescent risk taking and adolescent-parent relations.Received Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in child and family studies. Research interests include adolescent-parent relations and adolescent and adult development.Research interests include adolescent sexuality and interpersonal violence.     

青少年学校义务劳动状况的调查与分析

"学校义务劳动"是劳动教育的一种方式。邓小平说:"学生参与劳动,一是必须,二是适当,三看可能"。"学校义务劳动"是既易操作又有实效意义,是中小学劳动实践的主要形式。加强劳动教育,必须了解当前学生参与义务劳动的情况。通过调查分析,我们认为青少年的"学校义务劳动"实践环节薄弱,没有形成一套行之有效的、可持续发展的方法模式。     

Family and Individual Predictors of Late Adolescents' Romantic Relationships

The present study examined parent–adolescent conflict and late adolescents' attachment anxiety and depressive symptoms as predictors of late adolescents' romantic relationships. Questionnaires assessing parent–adolescent conflict resolution behaviors, adolescent–romantic partner conflict resolution behaviors, and adolescent attachment anxiety and depressive symptoms were completed by 256 college students (198 females and 58 males). Using hierarchical regression analyses, statistical models were tested wherein adolescent–romantic partner conflict resolution behaviors were regressed on mother–adolescent and father–adolescent conflict resolution behaviors and adolescents' attachment anxiety and depressive symptoms. All four predictor variables explained significant portions of the variance in adolescent–romantic partner conflict resolution behaviors; however, different predictors were found for females and males. For females, mother–adolescent and father–adolescent conflict resolution strategies and adolescent attachment anxiety were significant predictors. In contrast, father–adolescent conflict resolution behaviors and adolescent depressive symptoms were significant predictors for males. Findings highlight the differential role of familial and individual attributes in female and male adolescents' romantic relationship functioning.     

Secrets in the bedroom: Adolescents' private use of media

This essay discusses the functions of solitary media use within the ongoing daily emotional lives of adolescents. I review evidence suggesting that adolescents find in solitary TV watching and especially music listening, the opportunity, first, to cultivate a newly discovered private self: teens use media to explore numerous possible selves including those that are desired and feared. Second, I propose that solitary media experiences provide adolescents an important context for dealing with stress and negative emotion. Popular music listening allows adolescents to internalize strong emotional images around which a temporary sense of self can cohere.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the fifth biennial meetings of the Society for Research on Adolescence, San Diego, California, February 10–13, 1994. Much of the research upon which this paper is based was funded by NIMH grant No. 1 R01 MH38324 awarded to Reed Larson and Maryse Richards.Received his Ph.D. in Human Development from the University of Chicago. Research focuses on the temporal and emotional organization of daily life, especially in adolescence and within adolescents' families.     

the scent of memory: strangers,our own and others

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’ and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a nonbinarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’.     

Adolescents' response to nuclear threat: Before and after the chernobyl accident

This study investigated adolescent responses to nuclear threat during intervals preceding and following the Chernobyl disaster. The Nuclear Threat Index was administered to 96 Israeli subjects two months prior to and two months following the disaster. In addition, they were tested with Rotter's Locus of Control Scale. The data results indicate that on the whole there were differences in scores between the two administrations, especially with respect to self-reported activity (behavioral subscales). Adolescents reported significantly more past nuclear-related activity before the accident as well as fewer anticipated activities after the accident. Adjusted for the preaccident score differences data reveal that after the accident younger adolescents reported less pessimism and more previous activity than the older adolescents. In addition, males reported more nuclear-related activity than females; younger males reported more past activity and less pessimism than older males; external males reported more activity than internal males. Discussion focuses on possible explanations for the results, on limitations of the investigation, and on implications for further research.Received Ph.D. in school counseling from Tel Aviv University. Research interests: evaluation of primary prevention programs, crisis intervention in mass disasters, and death studies.Received D.Sc. from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) Department of Management Science. Research interests: Statistics.Received M.A. in Education from University of Haifa, School guidance and counseling, Haifa, Israel.     

Who's the Boss? Patterns of Perceived Control in Adolescents' Friendships

This study examined the nature and correlates of different patterns of perceived control in adolescents' relationships with their best friends. Participants included firstborn adolescents (M = 14.94 years), their younger siblings (M = 12.44 years) and both their mothers and fathers in 163 families as well as a best friend of each adolescent (M = 15 years). Data were collected from family members during home visits regarding adolescents' family relationships, friendships, and psychosocial adjustment; time use data were gathered during a series of 7 nightly phone interviews. Information was obtained from best friends during a brief phone interview. We developed a typology of 3 different patterns of perceived friendship control based on the combination of adolescents' and their best friends' ratings of relational control. Patterns of control in adolescents' friendships were associated with the distribution of control in both parents' marriages and adolescents' sibling relationships. Further analyses, designed to test developmental predictions, revealed connections between friendship control and other qualities of adolescents' friendships (i.e., intimacy, conflict, perspective-taking).     

Television in Indian Adolescents' Lives: A Member of the Family

To understand the effects of TV on youth, it is important to know the context in which they view it. This paper reports findings from an Experience Sampling study of 100 urban, middle-class Indian families to elucidate the context of use for this group. Mothers, fathers, and 8th graders carried alarm watches for 1 week and provided 13,674 reports on their activities and subjective states at random times across waking hours when signalled. TV viewing occupied 10.9% of these adolescents' time (about 12 h per week). Ninety percent of this viewing occurred at home, with majority of it, 73%, done with other family members, including 7% with grandparents, uncles, or aunts. This indicates that TV viewing for these youth is typically a family activity, occurring in a context in which parents' supervision and influence is likely. Adolescents' rates of viewing were correlated with mothers' rates of viewing, with rates for both higher when mothers were unemployed. Adolescents' TV rates were also correlated with fathers' rates and with fathers' type of employment. During TV viewing, adolescents reported lower than average challenge, worry, and paying attention, and higher than average choice, calm, and relaxation. As a whole, the findings indicate that the TV viewing of middle-class Indian youth is typically a relaxed antidote to the stresses of the day that they share with their families.     

Family processes and the competence of adolescents and primary school children

Associations were examined between 12 measures of family process and 6 measures of personal and social competence for 102 adolescents aged 15–16 and 99 children aged 8–9. Canonical correlations analysis revealed that general competence among primary school children was associated with high levels of support from parents, a high allocation of household responsibility, a high level of parental control, and a low level of parental punishment. Among adolescents, general competence was associated with a high level of support from parents, a low level of parental control, a high allocation of household responsibility, parental use of induction, a low level of parental punishment, high-quality sibling relationships, and high family cohesion. The findings suggest that as children enter adolescence, general competence becomes more closely bound up with the quality of sibling relations and the degree of parental control, and less closely bound up with support from parents.The data reported herein were collected as part of the Children in families Study, designed by Gay Ochiltree (fellow) and Don Edgar (director) of the Australian Institute of Family Studies. This article is based on a paper presented at the Second Australian Family Research Conference, November 1986, Melbourne, Australia.Paul R. Amato obtained his Ph.D. in psychology from James Cook University in Australia. His interests lie in social psychology, socialization, and family interaction.     

A Prospective Study of Adolescents' Peer Support: Gender Differences and the Influence of Parental Relationships

This longitudinal study investigates parent and child predictors of adolescents' perceived social support from peers. Adolescents (285) and their parents filled out surveys when students were 11 and 15 years of age. Parent reports of their own social support and child reports of parental support to them, depression, and self-esteem were used as predictors of adolescents' peer social support. Path analyses revealed functional dissimilarity in the predictive model, for boys and girls. For boys and girls, the amount of spousal support parents' reported impacted the amount of parent to child support that children reported. For boys, this relationship impacted their perceptions of peer support indirectly through depression. However, for girls, parents' own supportive relationships directly impacted both their self-esteem and depression, above and beyond parent to child support, which then impacted girls' peer social support.     

Adolescents' perceptions of the costs and benefits associated with cigarette smoking: Sex differences and peer influence

This study explored the perceptions of young adolescents of the costs and benefits of cigarette smoking. These perceptions were examined as a function of the sex of the adolescent and peer smoking habits. The sample consisted of 155 White middle class male and female adolescents, aged 12 to 15. The results indicate that endorsement of particular costs and benefits was related to the respondent's sex and whether or not the respondent had friends who smoked. The girls seemed to view smoking as a sign of rebellion or autonomy, while the boys seemed to view smoking cigarettes as a social coping mechanism. The effect of having friends who smoke was always mediated by the sex of the adolescents. Boys who have friends who smoke have attitudes that appear more conducive to smoking than do boys with nonsmoking friends. This relationship did not hold for girls. The implications for smoking education and intervention are discussed.This work was supported in part by the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Metropolitan Detroit as supported by Grant CA - 22453 from the National Cancer Institute, DHHS.     

Adolescents' Perceptions of the Relevance of Domains of Identity Formation: A South African Cross-Cultural Study

This study investigated South African Afrikaans-, English-, and Xhosa-speaking secondary school adolescents' (N = 1217) perceptions of the relative importance of identity-related domains. For this purpose a structured questionnaire consisting of 14 domain-specific items was used. Most of the domains were regarded as very important or fairly important by a significant majority of participants. Four domains were regarded as very important by more than 70% of the total research group, namely, future career, moral values, family relationships, and religious matters. Political and sexual matters were regarded as of least importance. Intercultural differences were evident in most domains. Significant gender differences were also found. Relatively more females than males reported a high priority to domains such as future career, moral values, friendships with same sex peers, gender role, and community matters. The male participants regarded relationships with the opposite sex and sexual matters as more important than the females did. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of carefully considering the domains included in future research on identity formation, depending on variables such as socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics of the specific research groups to be included in the investigation.     

Transgender EU Citizens and the Limited Form of Union Citizenship available to them

Feminist Legal Studies - This article argues that only a limited form of EU citizenship is available to transgender people. As the paper demonstrates, transgender Union citizens face numerous...     

Adolescents' Commitment to Developing Talent: The Role of Peers in Continuing Motivation for Sports and the Arts

The role of peer relationships in supporting or hindering adolescents' talent development has received little research attention, despite the importance of peers in adolescents' lives. We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 41 adolescents talented in sports or the arts, and their parents, to investigate (a) the role of peer relationships in adolescents' continued involvement in their talent activities, (b) possible differences in this role by activity domain, and (c) possible gender differences. Thematic analysis indicated that peers typically played a positive function in supporting the continued involvement of talented adolescents in their talent activities. There were differences in opportunities for peer relationships and social satisfaction between in-school and out-of school activities, but not between activity domains. Both males and females mentioned equally social benefits of such involvement. However, females mentioned receiving negative peer attention more frequently than males, and more often cited social dissatisfaction as a significant contributor to decreased involvement or quitting.