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Suicide prevention efforts can be enhanced by attending to variability within transgender populations, particularly the heightened risk for female to male and nonbinary transgender adolescents.

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The current study presented 1,933 adolescents from 13 schools with a scenario about a hypothetical peer's plan to "do something dangerous" at school and asked how likely they would be to respond with four different actions: intervene directly, tell a teacher or principal, discuss it with a friend but not an adult, and do nothing. High school students were less likely than those in middle school to say they would approach the peer directly or confide in a teacher or principal. Students were most likely to favor taking action on their own over all of the other response strategies. Students with positive perceptions of their schools were more likely to say they would do something rather than ignore their peer's dangerous intentions. These relationships were mediated by students' beliefs that confiding in a teacher may have unfavorable consequences. Findings from this study support the important role schools play in creating a culture where students take responsibility for one another.Keywords school climate; adolescents; teachers; intervention; peers On March 5th, 2001, Charles "Andy" Williams stomped into Santana High School in Santee, California, and opened gunfire. In 6 min, he killed 2 students, injured 13 others, and stripped an entire community of its sense of security. As many as 20 students were privy to Williams' intentions to "shoot up the school on Monday," yet this information was never revealed to an adult (Figueroa & Rogers, 2005;Moran, 2001Moran, , 2002. The fact that peers knew but did not take action is not unique to this instance. Statistics in the Safe School Initiative report funded by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education reveal that in 81% of school shootings between 1974 and 2000, the attacker told someone about his plans-almost always a peer, sibling, or friend (Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002). Yet, these young people decided not to alert anyone in authority about the attack.Despite myriad popular press stories on this "code of silence" surrounding school shootings (e.g., Dedman, 2000;Moran & Kucher, 2001;Roth, 2001;Springer, 2005) and youth culture more generally, the extant literature that might help to explain the phenomenon is rather scant. This leads to the question, What is the psychology underlying the inaction of fellow students NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript who might have prevented harm by acting on their knowledge of a peer's dangerous intentions? While incidents of lethal school violence are rare, situations in which classmates have knowledge of a peer's plan to do something dangerous are not. Less "extreme" cases of students ignoring the dangerous behaviors of peers play out every day in schools. Our goal is to understand this code of silence. Thus, the current study presented adolescents with a scenario about a hypothetical peer's plans to "do something dangerous" at school and asked the participating youths how likely they would be to respond with four different actions. We looked at ...

Using annual cross-sectional data from Monitoring the Future, the present study examined trends in high school seniors' current and anticipated civic participation and beliefs over a 30-year period. We examined overall trends and patterns based on youths' post-high school educational plans. Findings point to declines in recent cohorts' involvement in conventional and alternative forms of engagement but greater involvement in community service. Regardless of period, the majority of youth said they intended to vote when eligible but few expressed trust in the government or elected officials. All civic indicators showed significant differences based on youths' college aspirations: Youth who planned to graduate from a 4-year college were more civically inclined than their peers with 2-year or no college plans.Adolescents are a barometer for the future of democracy, and over the past two decades, increased attention has been paid to the factors that engage young people in civic action. Yet, the extant work lacks a historical perspective, which is important for understanding the role of younger generations in political change. According to the life course principle of historical embeddedness, the period in which young people come of age is highly relevant to the formation of their civic identities (Elder, 1994;Stewart & McDermott, 2004). Social change occurs when younger cohorts carry these identities forward and replace their elders as voters and civic leaders (Lyons & Alexander, 2000). Thus, studying civic engagement across different historical periods and cohorts reveals the lens through which younger Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Dr. Amy Syvertsen, Search Institute, 615 First Avenue Northeast, Suite 125, Minneapolis, MN 55413. amys@search-institute.org. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Emerging Adulthood (2007, February) NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript generations view their society and collectively contribute to shaping the body politic (Mannheim, 1952(Mannheim, /1972. With this in mind, the present study examined trends over a 30-year period in U.S. high school seniors' civic behaviors and beliefs. To determine whether these trends differ in relation to adolescents' likely social class trajectories, we compared youths' civic engagement based on their college aspirations. These analyses contribute to debates about whether certain forms of youth civic engagement have fallen out of favor over time, about whether political optimism or cynicism characterizes different generations of youth, and about whether the social class divide in civic engagement has widened.Over the past decade, the conventional wisdom has been that youth have grown cynical about electoral politics, much as the empirical work with adults has suggested (Putnam, 2000). Galston (2002) argued that, in contrast to volunteer work through which young people feel they have an impact, many youth believe that conventional politics is ineffectual, slo...