Cristian A. Rojas-Barahona

La escala de autoestima de Rosenberg: Validación para Chile en una muestra de jóvenes adultos, adultos y adultos mayores

entiende la autoestima como unsentimiento hacia uno mismo, que puede serpositivo o negativo, el cual se construye pormedio de una evaluacion de las propias caracteris-ticas. La escala fue dirigida en un principio aadolescentes, hoy se usa con otros grupos etarios.Su aplicacion es simple y rapida. Cuenta con 10items, divididos equitativamente en positivos ynegativos (ejemplos, sentimiento positivo: “creoque tengo un buen numero de cualidades”,sentimiento negativo: “siento que no tengo mu-chos motivos para sentirme orgulloso de mi”). Esun instrumento unidimensional que se contesta enuna escala de 4 alternativas, que va desde “muyde acuerdo” a “muy en desacuerdo”.La EAR es ampliamente utilizada en Chile,pero no existe evidencia de un proceso devalidacion publicado, por tanto el proposito deeste estudio fue determinar su confiabilidad yvalidez en una muestra chilena.M

Validation of the Spanish Version of the Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) Scale in Chilean Adolescents and Its Association with School-Related Outcomes and Substance Use.

School membership appears to be an important factor in explaining the relationship between students and schools, including school staff. School membership is associated with several school-related outcomes, such as academic performance and expectations. Most studies on school membership have been conducted in developed countries. The Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) scale (18 items: 13 positively worded items, 5 negatively worded items) has been widely used to measure this construct, but no studies regarding its validity and reliability have been conducted in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. This study investigates the psychometric properties, factor structure and reliability of this scale in a sample of 1250 early adolescents in Chile. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provide evidence of an excellent fit for a one-factor solution after removing the negatively worded items. The internal consistency of this new abbreviated version was 0.92. The association analyses demonstrated that high school membership was associated with better academic performance, stronger school bonding, a reduced likelihood of school misbehavior, and reduced likelihood of substance use. Analyses showed support for the reliability and validity of the PSSM among Chilean adolescents.

Improvement of Working Memory in Preschoolers and Its Impact on Early Literacy Skills: A Study in Deprived Communities of Rural and Urban Areas.

Research Findings: The present study evaluated the impact of a working memory (WM) stimulation program on the development of WM and early literacy skills (ELS) in preschoolers from socioeconomically deprived rural and urban schools in Chile. The sample consisted of 268 children, 144 in the intervention group and 124 in the comparison group. The computer-based intervention comprised 16 sessions of 30 min each. Children in the intervention group demonstrated significantly more progress in WM than those in the comparison group when we evaluated them 3 months after exposure to the program and controlled for initial differences with an analysis of covariance. ELS were significantly stronger in children who were exposed to the stimulation program, which supports a link between WM and ELS. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that children’s WM can be improved from an early age regardless of socioeconomic context or geographic location (rural or urban). This has direct implications for early education and may compensate for some of the difficulties that children experience when starting school.

Factores asociados a conductas promotoras de salud en adolescentes chilenos

BACKGROUND Health-promoting behaviors are important to prevent diseases and prolong life in the population. People develop these behaviors throughout life. However, better benefits for health are obtained with an early development. AIM To determine the prevalence of health-promoting behaviors among early adolescents and its associated factors. MATERIAL AND METHODS Cross-sectional survey performed in 1,465 students of high, medium and low socio-economic status, attending fifth to eighth grades of schools located in a small Chilean city. Participants answered a questionnaire that gathered information about frequency of health-promoting behaviors such as health responsibility and nutrition, physical exercise and stress management, life appreciation, social support and different personal, school and familial factors. RESULTS A higher frequency of health-promoting behaviors was associated with better academic achievement, better school commitment, and higher perception of school membership. It also was associated with a better perception of health status and a higher conformity with physical appearance. CONCLUSIONS Health promoting behaviors in these children are related to a better academic achievement and a higher integration with school environment.

Brief report: Association between psychological sense of school membership and mental health among early adolescents.

Mental health problems among adolescents are prevalent and are associated with important difficulties for a normal development during this period and later in life. Understanding better the risk factors associated with mental health problems may help to design and implement more effective preventive interventions. Several personal and family risk factors have been identified in their relationship to mental health; however, much less is known about the influence of school-related factors. One of these school factors is school belonging or the psychological sense of school membership. This is a well-known protective factor to develop good academic commitment, but it has been scarcely studied in its relationship to mental health. We explored this association in a sample of early adolescents and found that students who reported having a high level of school membership had lower mental health problems, even after controlling for several personal and family factors.

Psychometric Evaluation of the Adolescent Health Promotion Scale in Chile: Differences by Socioeconomic Status and Gender.

Background: The promotion of healthy behaviors is a relevant issue worldwide, especially among adolescent populations, as this is the developmental stage where most unhealthy behaviors become ingrained. Purpose: The aim of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Adolescent Health Promotion Scale (AHPS) in a Chilean sample of early adolescents. Methods: The sample was composed of 1,156 adolescents aged 10–14 years from schools in San Felipe, Chile. Item structure was assessed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses; reliability was measured using Cronbach’s alpha; and differences in terms of gender, age, and socioeconomic status (SES) were established using analysis of variance. Results: The analyses of item structure identified all of the six original factors (nutrition behaviors, health responsibility, social support, life appreciation, stress management and exercise behavior) as significant. However, eight items did not fit the Chilean population well. Therefore, the AHPS in Chile has been reduced to 32 items. The Cronbach’s alpha of the 32-item Chilean AHPS was .95, with the subscale coefficients ranging from .76 to .94. In addition, female subjects performed better than male subjects, and individuals of higher SES scored higher than the middle and lower socioeconomic groups. No differences on AHPS scores were found in different age groups. Conclusions: The AHPS appears to have good psychometric properties in terms of item structure and reliability. Consistent with studies carried out in other countries, health promotion behavioral differences were observed in association with gender and SES. The results support the Chilean version of the AHPS as an appropriate instrument for measuring the health promotion behaviors of early adolescents in Chile and for comparing results with those from other countries.

Substance Use among Adolescents Involved in Bullying: A Cross-Sectional Multilevel Study

Being involved in bullying as a victim or perpetrator could have deleterious health consequences. Even though there is some evidence that bullies and victims of bullying have a higher risk for drug use, less is known about bystanders. The aim of this research was to study the association between bullying experience (as victims, bullies, or bystanders) and substance use. We gathered complete information from a nationally representative sample of 36,687 students (51.4% female) attending 756 schools in Chile. We used a self-reported questionnaire which was developed based on similar instruments used elsewhere. This questionnaire was piloted and presented to an expert panel for approval. We used multilevel multivariate logistic regression analyses, controlling for several variables at the individual (e.g., school membership, parental monitoring) and school levels (e.g., school type, school denomination). This study shows that bullies and bully-victims have a high risk for cigarette, alcohol, and cannabis use than bystanders. This is one of the few studies exploring the association between witnessing bullying and substance use. These findings add new insights to the study of the co-occurrence of bullying and substance use. Other factors, such as higher academic performance, stronger school membership, and better parental monitoring reduced the risk of any substance use, while the experience of domestic violence and the perception of social disorganization in the neighborhood, increased the risk. These findings may help the design of preventive interventions.

Perceptual inferences about indeterminate arrangements of figures.

Previous studies in spatial propositional reasoning showed that adults use a particular strategy for making representations and inferences from indeterminate descriptions (those consistent with different alternatives). They do not initially represent all the alternatives, but construct a unified mental representation that includes a kind of mental footnote. Only when the task requires access to alternatives is the unified representation re-inspected. The degree of generalisation of this proposal to other perceptual situations was evaluated in three experiments with children, adolescents and adults, using a perceptual inference task with diagrammatic premises that gave information about the location of one of three possible objects. Results obtained with this very quick perceptual task support the kind of representation proposed from propositional spatial reasoning studies. However, children and adults differed in accuracy, with the results gradually changing with age: indeterminacy leads adults to require extra time for understanding and inferring alternatives, whereas children commit errors. These results could help inform us of how people can make inferences from diagrammatic information and make wrong interpretations.

Mental health among children and adolescents: Construct validity, reliability, and parent-adolescent agreement on the ‘Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire’ in Chile

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a screening tool used to measure psychological functioning among children and adolescents. It has been extensively used worldwide, but its psychometric properties, such as internal structure and reliability, seem to vary across countries. This is the first study exploring the construct validity and reliability of the Spanish version of SDQ among early adolescents (self-reported) and their parents in Latin America. A total of 1,284 early adolescents (9–15 years) and their parents answered the SDQ. We also collected demographic variables. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the latent structure of the SDQ. We also used the multitrait-multimethod analysis to separate the true variance on the constructs from variance resulting from measurement methods (self-report vs. parent report), and evaluated the agreement between adolescents and their parents. We found that the original five-factor model was a good solution and the resulting sub-scales had good internal consistency. We also found that the self-reported and parental versions of SDQ provide different information, which are complementary and provide a better picture of the emotional, social, and conduct problems of adolescents. We have added evidence for the construct validity and reliability of the Spanish self-reported and parental SDQ versions in a Chilean sample.

Influencia de las conductas promotoras de salud de los padres en la de sus hijos adolescentes

Background: Family behavior models may influence health promoting conducts among adolescents. Aim: To determine the association between health promoting behaviors among parents and healthy behaviors of early adolescents. Material and methods: Analysis of the baseline assessment of a longitudinal study of early adolescents in the city of San Felipe, Region of Valparaiso, Chile. Parents and their teenage children, attending 5th to 7th grade, from ten municipal schools, participated in this study. Self-reported questionnaires were used to assess healthy lifestyles, answered separately by parents and their children. Univariable and multivariable ordinal logistic regression analyses with complete data were carried out, using the students’ health promoting behaviors as dependent variables and the same behaviors among parents as the main predictors, controlling for other personal and family variables. Results: We contacted 1035 parents and 682 consented to participate along with 560 students. The mean age of adolescents was 11.5 ± 1.2 years (49% females) The mean age of parents was 39.8 ± 8.8 years and 90% were women. The parental behaviors associated with teenage health promoting behaviors were eating vegetables (odds ratio (OR)=1.22, p<0.05), having breakfast (OR=1.27, p<0.05), do stretching exercises every day (OR=1.19, p<0.05) and take some time for relaxation (OR=1.24, p<0.05). Conclusions: These results show an association between healthy behaviors among parents and these behaviors among their adolescent offspring.