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The role of behavioral, sociometric, and attributional indices of social functioning in the development of peer‐related loneliness was investigated in a short‐term longitudinal study. Data were collected across a 1‐year time span on 3 occasions from 128 third‐ through sixth‐graders. Results were consistent with an additive model of loneliness. Withdrawn social behavior, lower peer acceptance, few or no friendships, and an internal‐stable attributional style predicted higher levels of concurrent and future loneliness. Children who declined in peer acceptance, lost friends, and gained in internal‐stable attributions showed gains in loneliness. Subgroup analyses indicated that children with no friends reported more loneliness than children with 1 or more friends; low‐status friendless children reported more loneliness than low‐status children with one or more friends; and low‐status friendless children reported more loneliness than average‐ and high‐status friendless children. Taken together, the findings suggest that loneliness in middle childhood is a stable phenomenon located in a complex web of interrelated aspects of social functioning.

Cross-cultural research on university students' approaches to study has examined the possible cultural specificity of Biggs' Study Process Questionnaire, but the problem of the confounding effect of individual characteristics and contextual variables has received little empirical attention. The present study addressed this issue, by investigating cross-cultural differences in students' approaches to study when the academic course and context are the same for culturally distinct groups. Two matched groups of local Australian and South-east Asian students were compared at the beginning and the end of their first semester at university. The similarities in the patterns of change of the two groups support the view that study approaches are influenced by students' perceptions of course requirements rather than determined by stable personal characteristics of individuals or cultural differences. Although South-east Asian students scored higher on the surface measures than their western counterparts, finer analyses breaking down the surface construct into meaningful sub-components revealed no difference between the twogroups in the 'narrowness' aspect of their study. South-east Asian students were adaptive to the demands of the new educational context and became more similar to local students by the end of their first semester of academic study in a western institution.Research into university students' approaches to study is extensive and has been conducted in a number of western countries. Some of these studies involve phenomenographic research (Marton, 198 1 ), while other studies have used questionnaires administered to large numbers of students (Biggs,

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