Robert D. Felner

Social support in high-risk adolescents: structural components and adaptive impact.

This study examines the structure of social support and its relationship to adjustment for adolescents from high-stress lower socioeconomic class inner-city backgrounds. An attempt is made to (a) identify meaningful dimensions of perceived social support for this population; (b) examine the degree to which the perceived helpfulness of each source of support varied as a function of age, sex, and ethnic background; and (c) determine the relationship between the dimensions of social support, personal characteristics of the adolescent, and indices of personal and academic adjustment. Factor analyses reveal three distinct support dimensions: Family, Formal, and Informal Support. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance show differences in the perceived helpfulness of the support dimensions as a function of the adolescents age, sex, and ethnic background as well as in the relationship of each source of support to the adjustment indices. Implications of the findings for elaborating the impact of social support on coping efforts are discussed.

The impact of school transitions: A focus for preventive efforts

The relationship between cumulative or single school transfers and a students academic adjustment was explored. The school records of 250 high school students were examined and school transfers due to either residential mobility or the normative school change from eighth to ninth grade were identified. Correlations between the cumulative number of school transfers in a students history and their ninth-grade academic performance and attendance record were computed for both ethnic and sex subgroups. Analyses of variance for repeated measures were performed to assess the impact of any single school transition occurring at different points in the childs development. Correlational analyses indicated that high rates of school mobility were significantly related to poor academic performance, particularly for black and Hispanic students. Analyses of variance revealed that while no single school transition due to residential mobility in Grades 1 through 8 had a significant impact on the students posttransfer adjustment, the normative transition to high school was significantly related to lowered school performance and increased absences, particularly for students with a history of repeated school transfers and for black students.

Parental death or divorce in childhood: Problems, interventions, and outcomes in a school based mental health project

Children with histories of parental separation/divorce or death in a school based helping program with nonprofessional child-aides were compared directly to each other and to referred children without such histories on initial referral problems, treatment goals, and outcome measures. Children with separation/divorce histories were rated by child-aides as having more serious acting-out problems at referral. Aides also set more treatment goals aimed at reducing acting-out for such children than for those with parental death or without such histories. Child-aides also tended to rate children with histories of parental death as having more serious shy-anxious problems and set more treatment goals aimed at reducing such problems than for separation/divorce children. No consistent outcome differences were found between the groups. Implications of these findings for future program direction are discussed. The need for more truly preventive programming for children experiencing such events is emphasized.