Who has the final say? Decisions on adolescent behaviour within the family

The transition to adolescence involves significant changes for the family. To date, research on these changes and how they occur has been restricted by lack of suitable measures. An instrument-the Perspectives on Adolescent Decision-Making questionnaire-was designed for such research. It examines 21 issues which can lead to conflict. The instrument was completed by 500 Italian adolescents aged 13 and 15. Sensitivity to age and sex differences was examined, and perceptions of personal choice, parental feelings, conflict and normal patterns for adolescents were analysed. The instrument offers promising possibilities for more effective study of parent/offspring relationships during the adolescent period. (C) 1996 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescent

Measuring Student Ability, Classifying Schools, and Detecting Item Bias at School Level, Based on Student-Level Dichotomous Items

In educational measurement, responses of students on items are used not only to measure the ability of students, but also to evaluate and compare the performance of schools. Analysis should ideally account for the multilevel structure of the data, and school-level processes not related to ability, such as working climate and administration conditions, need to be separated from student and school ability. However, in educational studies such as Programme for International Student Assessment, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, and COOL5–18, this is hardly ever done. This study presents a model that simultaneously accounts for the nested structure, controls student ability for processes at school level, classifies schools to monitor and compare schools, and tests for school-level item bias

Examining Neighbourhood and School Effects Simultaneously

Neighbourhoods and schools are two contexts in which youth spend vast amounts of their time—making friends, forming opinions and attitudes, and learning the social and academic skills that help them navigate through life. In the neighbourhood effects literature, schools are theorised to be a pathway or mechanism of the neighbourhood’s influence on children and youth. We tested this hypothesis using a longitudinal dataset of 9897 secondary school students. We estimated school and neighbourhood effects separately, and then considered youths’ simultaneous membership in both contexts. In the latter analysis, the associations between neighbourhood characteristics and achievement were reduced to non-significance, while the associations with the school context remained strong and significant. These results point to schools as a pathway through which the influence of the neighbourhood may be transmitted, and underscore the need for better conceptualisations of the mutiple and interrelated contexts that youth inhabit