Past research has identified many correlates of failure to complete 12 years of high school, but further work is required to synthesise this knowledge prior to the implementation of appropriately targeted intetventions. In the current study, a detailed questionnaire containing items relevant to school leaving was constructed using the findings from past research. The questionnaire was administered to 299 students in Years 9 to 11 at a Queensland coeducational state high school. Factor analysis of the students' responses yielded nine factors which were related to an intention to withdraw from school prior to Year 12. Discriminant analysis indicated that early school leaving was most parsimoniously predicted by a combination of scales measuring academic and occupational values, past school performance, family support, and a “masculine-jock” orientation.

This paper on the coping actions of Australian adolescents reporls on research spanning a 5-year period. The central indicator of coping in this work is the Adolescent Coping Scale (ACS), an 80-item checklist that identifies 18 coping strategies commonly used by adolescents. There are clear indications that age, gender, and family of origin are concomitants of coping. Furthermore, coping varies according to adolescent perceptions of the self, perception of the adolescent's ability by others, family climate, and the experience of stress in the family. Positive family climate is generally associated with the use of functional styles of coping. Adolescents who are identified as highly able or gifted use a different coping repertoire in comparison to their nongifted peers. Young people in intact or separated households use similar strategies to manage their general concerns. Moreover, those dealing with separation of parents were generally as adaptive in their use of coping strategies.

All theories of adolescent development give sexuality a central place in negotiating the transition from child to adult. The sexual urges that emerge at puberty must be blended with other aspects of teenagers' lives and channelled adaptively. It is especially important that the adolescent be able to integrate his or her sexual feelings, needs, and desires into a coherent and positive self-identity, which contains, as one aspect, a sexual self. This sexual self is influenced in complex ways by cultural expectations and the sexual discourse characteristic of any social context. This study is a report of interviews with 153 adolescents aged 15 to 18 from three very different backgrounds: homeless youth, and Anglo-Australian and Greek-Australian young people living at home in a large Australian city. A number of themes about the ways young people describe their sexual worlds emerged from analysis of the interviews. The themes concerned permissiveness, romance, beliefs about both the “double standard” and the control of sexual urges, sexual aggression, and sexual “regrets.” The importance of these themes in influencing sexual self-definition and sexual behaviour is presented. The extent to which young people undergo conflict and questioning in integrating their ideas about sexuality and their actual sexual behaviours is considered.

Adaptive behaviour scales represent an alternative to standardised intelligence tests for assessing children with multiple disabilities. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the reliability of an adaptive behaviour scale used in Hungarian Conductive Education programs for children with neurological impairments. Forty-five children with multiple disabilities were assessed on two separate occasions by their teachers and physiotherapists. Scores were compared across raters (interobserver agreement) and across the two assessment occasions (test-retest reliability). Interobserver agreement averaged 55.5%, and the overall test-retest reliability was 75%. Suggestions for improving interobserver agreement and test-retest reliability are discussed.

Thirty four high school students were assigned to one of six focus groups according to their self-reported drug status (i.e., user, ex-user, nonuser). Allgroups viewed the same two video vignettes, and a drug user was identified as the target character in the second vignette. At the completion of each vignette they answered a series of questions about the target character in each video. Results indicated that adolescents assign reputations to persons according to the activities in which they engage, and that this assignment is influenced by their own similar or dissimilar activities. An analysis of vocabulary revealed that meaning was context specific to the subculture. In many instances nonusers were unaware of the meaning of the vocabulary used by their drug using peers.

Student motivation as an organised system of relations between the self and learning involves a set of beliefs and intentions that function as motives for action. The present research programme proposes that students in formal leaming settings come equipped with particular views of what school learning is all about, the purpose of their learning, and of themselves as learners. Findings from a longitudinal study investigating student motivation as expressed in curiosity and approaches to school learning are described. The ways adolescents connect themselves (or fail to connect themselves) with their learning are examined in two cohorts of female students assessed in Years 7, 9, and 11.

This study examines the influence of demographic factors such as age, sex, and school setting on self-estimate ability. The subjects (N = 1814) in this study were administered an interest inventory (Vocational lnterest Survey) and a self-rating scale (Work Interest Survey). Similarity between self-estimate and measured interest profiles was assessed using the correlation between individual's profiles and the squared Euclidean distance (D2), and its components (elevation, scatter, and shape by scatter). There were significant differences between boys and girls on profile parameters of elevation, the overall distance between profiles, and self-estimate ability. Girls, on the whole, were better able to estimate the pattern of measured interests (0.62), compared to boys (0.55), but the magnitude of this difference between these coefficients (i.e., 0.07) was very small. Age differences between four age groups (14, 15, 16, and those over 16 years) were small. The mean correlation at 14 years was 0.64 compared with 0.57 at 16 years and 0.4 for those over 16 years. Differences between single-sex schools and co-educational schools were the third factor considered. Girls' schools had the highest correlation between the VIS and WIS profiles (0.63), followed by co-educational schools (0.58) and boys' schools had the lowest profile correlation (0.55).

As personal goals continue to be emphasised in theories and research on motivation and future orientation, methods for assessing such goals have diversified. Research with adolescent students shows limitations in prevalent methodologies for eliciting and classifying the content of personal goals. The Future Time Perspective (FTP) model of Joseph Nuttin (1984, 1985) offers an alternative approach. The advantages of the FTP approach are demonstrated by examining the goal profiles of one student using both the FTP and a contrasting methodology (Seginer, 1988). This example is taken from a pilot study of 100 Year 7 and Year 11 secondary school students.

Recent research into aggressive behaviour in adolescents has used a social cognitive model to explore the contents of the cognitions (beliefs about aggression) that mediate aggressive behaviour. This present study examined the relationship between beliefs about aggression and empathy as mediators of aggressive behaviour and responses on a social problem solving task. Three different aggression status groups were used: antisocial adolescent offenders (38 males and 5 females) and adolescents rated by their teacher as being high aggressive (21 males and 11 females) and low aggressive (24 males and 43 females). Both antisocial and high aggressive males were more likely than low aggressive males to believe that aggression increases self-esteem and that aggression avoids a negative self-image. Antisocial and high aggressive females were more likely to endorse legitimacy of aggression and to believe that aggression avoids a negative image. Adolescents who chose hostile problem and goal definitions and who perceived positive consequences of aggression were less empathic and more likely to endorse beliefs supporting the use of aggression than adolescents with less hostile problem solving skills. The findings raise important questions regarding the content of adolescents' perception of the self and the part it plays in the regulation of behaviour in conflict situations.

Australian studies of teacher-rated levels of behaviour problems in schools are reviewed. Survey methodology and instrumentation affects incidence. The significance of these results is discussed in the light of two major considerations: the nature of “problem” and who defines it, and the need for a developmental perspective when interpreting data relating to childhood behaviour. The implications of teacher perceptions for system resource planning, referral and interagency networking, and intervention priority are considered,