Mental Health and School Functioning for Girls in the Child Welfare System : the Mediating Role of Future Orientation and School Engagement

This study investigated the association between mental health problems and academic and behavioral school functioning for adolescent girls in the child welfare system and determined whether school engagement and future orientation meditated the relationship. Participants were 231 girls aged between 12 and 19 who had been involved with the child welfare system. Results indicated that 39% of girls reported depressive symptoms in the clinical range and 54% reported posttraumatic symptoms in the clinical range. The most common school functioning problems reported were failing a class (41%) and physical fights with other students (35%). Participants reported a mean number of 1.7 school functioning problems. Higher levels of depression and PTSD were significantly associated with more school functioning problems. School engagement fully mediated the relationship between depression and school functioning and between PTSD and school functioning, both models controlling for age, race, and placement stability. Future orientation was not significantly associated with school functioning problems at the bivariate level. Findings suggest that school engagement is a potentially modifiable target for interventions aiming to ameliorate the negative influence of mental health problems on school functioning for adolescent girls with histories of abuse or neglect

Developing a Multi-Purpose Chat Application for Mobile Distributed Systems on Android Platform

The objective of this project was to design and implement a multi-purpose chat application for mobile distributed systems, which support both instant messaging and file sharing. The chat application is based on peer-to-peer network, which means there is no need for central server for peers to meet and talk. Besides supporting real-time messaging and file sharing, multi-purpose chat application also supports downloading files from the remote web server, and saving the image in the local secure digital card (SD card). The application client side implementation was done on Eclipse IDE with Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin using Java language and the peerdroid library. A rendezvous peer (a gathering point for peers connected on the JXTA network) was also implemented on Netbeans IDE using Java language. The results obtained in this project show that it is possible for multiple peers connected on the JXTA network to communicate in real-time manner and share resources with one another. Also users of a multi-purpose chat application were able to download images from the remote web server and save them on an SD card for future sharing with other peers on the network