Lorenza Dallago

High agreement on family affluence between children’s and parents’ reports: international study of 11-year-old children

Objective: To examine the agreement between parents’ and children’s reports on four items of family affluence: number of cars, own bedroom, number of family holidays and number of computers, and to analyse predictors of disagreement. Design: Cross-sectional child–parent validation study of selected items from an internationally standardised questionnaire. Setting: Survey conducted in schools in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Scotland. Participants: 972 11-year-old children and their parents responded to the questionnaires. Results: The child item response rates were high (above 93%). The per cent agreement was low for holidays spent with family (52.5%), but high for the other three items of family affluence (76.2–88.1%). The kappa coefficients were good or excellent for all items (between 0.41 and 0.74) and the gamma coefficients were strong for all items (between 0.56 and 0.96). Children from single-parent families were more likely to over-report family affluence (OR 2.67; CI 1.83 to 3.89). Conclusions: Young adolescents’ self-reports of family affluence are fairly valid across the six countries. This finding suggests that the variables measured can be used in epidemiological studies that aim at ranking children according to socioeconomic position.

Adolescent Place Attachment, Social Capital, and Perceived Safety: A Comparison of 13 Countries

In adolescence, children become increasingly independent and autonomous, and spend more time in neighborhood settings away from home. During mid-to-late adolescence, youth often become more critical about the place they live. Their attachment to home and even community may decrease as they explore and develop new attachments to other specific places. The aim of this study is to understand how 15-year-old students from 13 countries perceive their local neighborhood area (place attachment, social capital and safety), and how these different community cognitions are interrelated. We hypothesize that their place attachment predicts safety, and that the relationship is mediated in part by social capital. Result show that, despite cross-cultural differences in neighborhood perceptions, the proposed theoretical model fits robustly across all 13 countries.

Cross-national associations between parent and peer communication and psychological complaints

Objectives:To assess whether or not communication with parents and with peers is related to experiencing psychological complaints in an attempt to explore the hypotheses of continuity and compensation or moderation between contexts.Methods:Questions on communication with their parents and peers, as well as on the frequency with which they experience psychological complaints were answered by 200,857 adolescents from 36 countries.Results:A cluster analysis detected four groups of adolescents. Those with better communication in both social contexts were the ones showing less psychological complaints. Moreover, we have found (using a regression analysis) that good communication with peers does not improve their experience of psychological complaints if the communication with parents is not good.Conclusions:We conclude that our findings are consistent with the continuity hypothesis and against the compensating or moderating one.

The Adolescents, Life Context, and School Project: Youth Voice and Civic Participation

The Adolescents, Life Context, & School project was developed in a suburban, residential area of Padova, Italy, and involved three classes of 12-year-old children. Across three months, children observed, documented, and talked about their own life contexts in order to voice problems to decision makers. Both teachers and council members played key roles in supporting the project and the childrens work. Limited quantitative results showed an increase in reported neighborhood civic responsibility compared to a control group of students. Qualitative evaluation results demonstrated strong interest. The involvement by teachers, local government, and students in the project led to real actions and improvements in the neighborhood and school and to the creation of an official youth affairs council. The program provides a model for service-learning and organized student civic engagement.

Television Viewing, Computer Use, and a Hostile Perception of Classmates Among Adolescents From 34 Countries

The present study investigated the relationship between adolescents’ perception of a lack of classmate support and their individual and their respective culture’s daily amounts of television viewing and computer use. We tested multilevel regression models based on data from the responses of 150 552 adolescents aged 11, 13, and 15 years from 34 cultures who participated in the 2001-2002 Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey. Results revealed that the average amount of television viewing in the respective adolescents’ culture explained variation in their perception of a lack of classmate support in addition to their own amount of television viewing. No effect for computer use was found. It appears that, in countries in which a great deal of television is consumed, everyone is affected and not only those who watch a high amount of television. This adds to concerns about television viewing as a significant risk to the health of adolescents.

Comportamento antisociale e contesti di vita in preadolescenza

The aim of the present study is to analyze the influence of different contexts on the development of antisocial behaviours during early-adolescence. We analyzed different contexts such as family, peer group, school and neighbourhood. The sample was composed by 1.155 students (51.3% males) from 5 middle schools in Veneto Region. A multiple regression and a cluster analysis were used to analyze different interrelation among contexts’ perceptions. Results show that antisocial behaviours are more frequent among older students, males and youths living in an industrial suburban area. Higher level of monitoring, peer support and positive relationship with teachers play the role of protective factors while autonomous decisions and, especially, deviant peers can be considered highly dysfunctional. Significant interactions between monitoring and deviant peer, and between relationships with teachers and autonomous decisions were found. These interactions will be deeply commented in the paper. Cluster analysis was used to define contextual patterns (developed by multiple contextual aspects) and to analyze the relation among these clusters and antisocial behaviours. Results show that there are two specific groups of students that have higher levels of antisocial behaviours: these two groups are characterized by an high level of frequencies of deviant peer, or by a negative perception of all the contextual aspects considered.

Lo sviluppo del burnout: uno studio longitudinale su un campione di infermieri

The purpose of this study is to examine the development of burnout throughout the working career on a sample of professional nurses. The longitudinal study was conducted in 4 different times of nurses’ career: the last year of nursing school, 6 month after working insertion, 1 year later and 13 years later. The hypothesis is to find a decrease of burnout over time. The results don’t support totally the hypothesis. In fact, data show that there are 2 critical moments during nurses career: we found higher levels of burnout at the second time (working insertion) and at the last one (after more than 13 years of working activity), that is the time where burnout levels are higher. Keywords: burnout, nurses.