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The relationship between gender and global self-esteem in adolescence, while modest, has been well established, with boys consistently scoring higher than girls. In the present study, we sought to understand gender differences in adolescent self-esteem in terms of its component parts. With a relatively large (n = 545) sample of adolescents, drawn from Grades 8, 10. and 12, we specified 8 domains of adolescent self-esteem (personal security, home/parents, peer popularity, academic competence, attractiveness, personal mastery, psychological permeability, and athletic competence) across a number of different instruments and brought them together into a common assessment superstructure. Gender differences as well as the relative contributions of the different domains to overall self-esteem scores were measured. As predicted, boys attained slightly higher global self-esteem scores than girls did, by a difference of .22 standard deviation units. Contrary to our expectation of more balanced domain effects, boys significantly outperformed girls in 6 of 8 domains, whereas the 2 remaining domains exhibited no significant gender differences. There were no main or interaction effects for grade level. In terms of relative contribution of these domains to global self-esteem for the 2 genders, global self-esteem in boys and girls is predicted in very similar strengths and in the same order of magnitude by identical domains of self-esteem: home/parents, personal security, academic competence, attractiveness, and personal mastery-yielding multiple R 2 s from .88 to .91.

The career aspirations of high-achieving adolescent girls were explored by comparing them to the aspirations of adolescent boys as well as by looking at the influence of grade in school, achievement level, and an all-girls school environment. The participants' ideal and real career aspirations, scored in terms of prestige, were investigated via 2 sets of analyses , with coed (n = 704) and single-sex female (n = 494) adolescent samples. Results showed that high-achieving girls exceeded the aspirations of average-achieving girls and boys, and were the same as those of high-achieving boys. Gender and grade differences in ideal and real career choices over all achievement levels are also reported and discussed. Girls at single-sex schools had higher real career aspirations than did girls and boys at coed schools.

Diverse adolescents in grades 6-12 completed a demographic profile, the Teen Appreciation Scale, and various other instruments examining their perceptions of peer success. They rated likability, popularity, and attractiveness of vignette subjects in nine domains. Results indicated that female vignette subjects were rated significantly higher than male subjects by both genders and across all grades. (SM)

Adolescents' dialogues with friends and classmates about their academic performance constitute a central arena of self-disclosure for developing teenagers. Yet researchers have generally limited the range of their study of academic self-disclosure to gifted students. This study brings together the literature on self-disclosure, academic achievement, and adolescent development to elucidate the overlapping elements at play in adolescents' everyday decisions to talk about their academic performance. With an ethnically diverse sample of San Francisco Bay Area (\"Silicon Valley\") 10th and 12th graders, the authors developed a 12-scenario instrument specifying both interpersonal context (attraction/friendship) and relative-intelligence relationship (more, less, or equally smart), querying degrees of academic self-disclosure associated with these contexts. The results indicated that self-disclosure was highly (positively) influenced by the achievement level of both the discloser and listener, modestly influenced by friendship versus romantic interest, and influenced in anticipated directions by gender and age.

Parents and guardians (n=130) of Sixth graders from a culturally diverse middle-class school district completed questionnaires that were designed to elicit parents' conceptions of optimum healthy family functioning, asking for descriptive phrases about the best real life family they had known. Content categories were derived inductively from verbatim responses, which were broken into sentence or phrase units, then categorized by family subsystem and finally sorted into categories. The most frequently endorsed categories across all subsystems were Emotional bondedness, Commonness/Mutuality, and Communication. A content analysis revealed specific family features most valued to be: expressive communication, time together, and love. (Original abstract - amended)

This study is an examination of the relationship between dating status and academic achievement, academic motivation, depression, and self-esteem; it is an investigation of the differential effects wielded by gender and age (grade level) of the dating adolescent in each of these domains. Participants were a relatively large gender-balanced adolescent group (N = 380) from Grades 8, 10, and 12. Dating status was studied first as a binary variable (frequent versus infrequent dating) and second as a dating spectrum, including steady, frequent, and infrequent dating. Results showed that adolescents who dated frequently (more than once or twice a month), whether they were boys or girls, relatively young (8th grade) or more mature (l0th and 12th grades), exhibited consistently and significantly lower levels of academic achievement and academic motivation and higher levels of depressive symptoms. There were no significant effects of dating status on global self-esteem, but, as hypothesized, subscale analyses revealed important subscale-differentiated effects.

The qualities that comprise optimum family functioning are not necessarily continuous with those that define pathology, yet there exists little research on the definition of \"optimum\" versus pathological family functioning. Study 1 of this two-part work is a prototype study of laymen's perceptions of healthy family functioning. The sample was comprised of 130 parents and guardians of sixth graders from a middle class San Francisco Bay Area school district. Questionnaires were designed to elicit parents' conceptions of optimum healthy family functioning, asking for descriptive phrases about the best real life family they had known. Verbatim responses were broken into sentence or phrase units, then categorized by family subsystem (whole-family, spouse-spouse, parent-child, mother-child, and father-child), and finally sorted into content categories. The most frequently endorsed categories across all subsystems were Emotional Bondedness, Commonness/Mutuality, and Communication. A content analysis revealed specific family features most valued to be: expressive communication, time together, and love. Results were discussed in terms of both convergence with and divergence from the common notions of family health held in the literature reviewed. Family systems' research linking family environment to characteristics of family members has focused on presenting symptoms of \"identified patients.\" Study 2 examined physical, academic, social, and emotional characteristics in \"non-clinical\" sixth grade boys related to the quality of their family environment (high, mid-range or low functioning). Subjects were 109 sixth grade boys (and their families) from two non-contiguous San Francisco Bay Area school districts. Family environment was assessed by means of two structured in-home family interaction tasks, rated for family dynamics and parenting styles. Marital satisfaction was assessed by questionnaire. Measures of sixth grade boys' functioning included ratings of physical symptomatology, academic achievement and motivation, peer social preference, boys' distress (rated by teachers, mothers, fathers, peers, and self), and boys' restraint (rated by the same informants). In general, the quality of family environment had a mild to moderate relationship with boys' physical health, academic achievement and motivation, and social and emotional adjustment. The variance explained was modest (R$\\sp2$'s ranging from.05 to.25), but the effects were consistent across analyses. The addition of parenting styles and of marital satisfaction in regression models did not add incrementally to the variance explained by means of family variables alone.