Criteria for Children's Adjustment in School, Peer Group and Youth Movement

Abstract

Views of adjustment have undergone transformations, from a notion of competence as an innate urge to be effective, to the postulation of learned competencies suited to the demands of particular settings. Whereas much empirical work has been done on children's competent behaviour in schools, or school adjustment, the question of its generalizability elsewhere has been left open. The present pilot study examined and compared children's adjustment requirements in the school, the peer group and the youth movement, as viewed by the relevant norm-setters. Using an extended Hebrew version of Gesten's Health Resources Inventory (EH-HRI), 112 children of grades 5-7 (ages 10-12) from two Israeli primary schools were rated by 13 teachers, 26 peers and 10 youth leaders. Analyses of the ratings in both settings, separately for each school, yielded essentially similar factorial structures, also resembling those originally obtained in the USA. Correlates of school adjustment were found to pertain primarily to the 'rules/ obedience' and 'good student' factors: those associated with adjustment to the peer group belonged to the 'social adjustment' factor; and youth movement adjustment consisted of a diffuse variety of competencies. Evidently, all raters conceived of adjustment in their own settings as consisting of a distinct and rather unique complex of competencies. Specifically, the competencies required at school appeared to have almost no bearing on adjustment in the other settings. The idea that the schooling process plays a generalized socializatory role appears incongruent with the present findings, at least as far as concurrent adjustment requirements are concerned.