An instrument has been developed to assess psychosocial health of the family during the stage of having adolescent children, as perceived by the adolescent. The measure is based on a model integrating family systems research and the developmental tasks of adolescents. It examines six dimensions of family functioning: (1) Structure, (2) Affect, (3) Communication, (4) Behaviour control, (5) Value Transmission and (6) External Systems. A sample of 413 Year 10 students (¯x = 15·7 years) participated in the development of the instrument. Satisfactory levels of reliability and validity are reported. The Family Functioning in Adolescence Questionnaire (FFAQ) provides a means of assessment for researchers interested in family functioning during adolescence, and also for therapists and counsellors working with teenagers.
A test of factual knowledgeof about 10 nations was developed and applied to 96 Oxford children aged from 7 to I I , whose preferences for these nations had already been determined.The relationship between preference for and knowledge about other nations was found to be curvilinear in form and did not seem to be accountable for in terms of a similar relationship in environmentally available cues. Working-class children displayed considerably less knowledge than middle-class children. The causal implications of the findings are discussed.Most teachers who attempt to provide children with knowledge about other countries would hope thus to provide a basis for tolerance and understanding in international relations. This hope appears to be based upon a common-sense ' folk-psychological ' assumption : that prejudice and emotion are based upon certain (possibly erroneous) 'facts' which the child may be said to possess. Thus if the child believes certain 'good' things about a nation he will feel positively towards it, while if he believes ' bad ' things about it he will be prejudiced against it. To put this argument in more technical terms, one would maintain that cognitive components of national attitudes develop prior to-and tend to influence-affective components.Psychological research on adults (e.g. Carlson, 1956; Rosenberg, 1960) has also suggested a relationship of reciprocal causality between cognitive and affective components of attitudes. Such a relationship cannot, however, be assumed to exist for children since that may not fully have developed the meta-value of attitudinal consistency. Nor do we know whether the normal process of attitude development involves primarily the establishment of preferences based upon information or, on the other hand, the acquisition of information against an evaluative background. While the study of racial attitudes in children suggests that the affective component of attitudes towards human groups may be acquired before the child possesses even rudimentary information about them (Allport, 1954, ch. IS), similar studies in the field of national attitudes are rare.Such studies as there have been of the development of national concepts in children (see, for example,
The Children's Depression Scale was administered to fifth and sixth grades of two primary schools, mean age 11 years 5 months, and records analysed of 256 children. Reliability estimates for the scale were high. Average depression scores in this school population were considerably higher than those reported in the test manual for the normal group. Girls scored higher than boys on average. A factor analysis of the responses yielded nine interpretable oblique factors. The first two support the major categorization of items as those assessing depressive ideation and behaviour and those assessing the inability to experience pleasure, but there is no support for the sub‐scales designated by the authors of the CDS. Some validation of the factors obtained comes from their resemblance to those derived from adult depression measures and from diagnostic symptom listings. It is concluded that until the sub‐scales are further developed and validated it is safest to rely mainly on the D‐score as a measure of a general depression problem in children.
The purpose of the study was to investigate the joint effects of the child's level of intellectual maturity and of his system of preferences on his ability to understand that people other than himself (nationals of his own and of other countries that he ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’) would behave on the basis of principles guiding his own behaviour. The development of this ability to ‘reciprocate’ was investigated using tests of a fairly concrete nature and one actual play situation. The study confirmed previous findings, that as a function of age the children's preference for their own country becomes more marked and consistent and that they are also increasingly able to adopt the point of view of others; it has also shown, however, that this capacity is affected by the order of preferences in the sense that it is achieved with greater difficulty for countries which are disliked. These combined effects of age and affectivity, together with clear‐cut differences that were found between the behaviour of children from different social backgrounds, suggest that the development of national and international attitudes can be best understood when three major variables are taken into account: level of intellectual development, breadth of relevant experience, and the socially derived system of preferences.
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