The structure of perceived school climate and the relationship of climate dimensions to adaptation were examined in a large-scale multiyear investigation of students who attend middle-grade-level schools. Analyses of the structure, reliability, interrater convergence, and stability of school climate ratings were conducted in a large-scale sample of over 105,000 students in 188 schools. The climate scales exhibited a stable dimensional structure, high levels of internal consistency, and moderate levels of stability over 1-and 2-year time intervals. The relationship between climate ratings and students' adjustment was examined in 3 increasingly large samples of schools and students that were collected during successive years of this project. Ratings of multiple climate dimensions were associated consistently with indexes of academic, behavioral, and socioemotional adjustment.
This study employed a 2-year longitudinal design to examine the relation of stressful life events and social supports to psychological distress and school performance among 166 early adolescents (mean age = 13.5 years). A prospective approach was utilized to control for initial levels of adjustment when examining the relation of Time 1 stress and support variables to Time 2 psychological distress and school performance. Both stress and support variables made significant contributions to the prediction of subsequent psychological distress. Stresses, but not supports, made a significant contribution to the prediction of subsequent school performance. Evidence for reciprocal and interactive linkages was also found, including effects of psychological distress and school performance on subsequent stresses and supports, and greater adaptive impact of school-based supportive resources under conditions of heightened risk outside of school. Implications for ecological and transactional models of development relating to the targeting and efficacy of preventive efforts are discussed.
This study examines the structure of social support and its relationship to adjustment for adolescents from high-stress lower socioeconomic class inner-city backgrounds. An attempt is made to (a) identify meaningful dimensions of perceived social support for this population; (b) examine the degree to which the perceived helpfulness of each source of support varied as a function of age, sex, and ethnic background; and (c) determine the relationship between the dimensions of social support, personal characteristics of the adolescent, and indices of personal and academic adjustment. Factor analyses reveal three distinct support dimensions: Family, Formal, and Informal Support. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance show differences in the perceived helpfulness of the support dimensions as a function of the adolescent's age, sex, and ethnic background as well as in the relationship of each source of support to the adjustment indices. Implications of the findings for elaborating the impact of social support on coping efforts are discussed.
Prior work has suggested that methodological and conceptual confounding may play a role in the associations obtained between stressful life events, social resources, and adaptive outcome. Of particular concern in our work were (a) the source and method of assessment; (b) conceptual overlap between life stress and resource items and symptoms of disorder; and (c) induced response bias through the instructional sets of the stress measures. A second goal was to extend our understanding of the life stress-adjustment linkage in groups for whom little data of this type exist. By using multi-trait-multimethod procedures we found that both distal major life events and proximal daily stressors had important degrees of unique and shared variance with adaptive functioning, whereas the effects for social support were inconclusive. Further, the importance of considering possible sources of potential confounding in producing quite different levels of association between life stress and adaptation was underscored by the results.
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