The third in a series of reports from P/PV's three-year study of the role Boys & Girls Clubs play in the lives of the youth they serve, "Making Every Day Count" examines how Club participation is related to youth's positive and healthy development in three outcome areas identified by Boys & Girls Clubs of America as central to its mission: good…

Background: Suicide is one of the most common causes of death among young people. A report from the US Surgeon General called for strategies to prevent suicide, including increasing public awareness of suicide and risks factors, and enhancing research to understand risk and protective factors. Weight perception has been linked to depression and…

Visual images create desire. As artifacts from contemporary visual culture, visual images inform everyone about society, telling everyone who they are and what they value. They register subliminally within everyone's psyches and alter everyone's perceptions, sometimes without everyone's knowledge. Visual images seem to keep coming and often…

The purpose of the research was to identify variables affecting the attitudes and involvement of school counsellors in the inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classrooms. The sample included 220 primary and middle school counsellors in Israel. Two specially constructed questionnaires (i.e., the Involvement in Inclusion Questionnaire…

Over the past decade, considerable legal and policy discussion has emerged about sexual activity between young teens and older individuals. This discussion has been prompted by the growing awareness of the personal and societal costs of this activity. Sex between young teens and older individuals is linked with risky sexual behaviors that could…

Youth violence is an important public health problem, but few researchers have studied violence from youth's perspectives. Middle school students' essays about the causes of youth violence were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. The causes of violence identified by students were categorized into individual, peer, family, and…

The goal of this study is to analyze the images of science and scientists in science biographies written for children. We examined 12 biographies of historic and contemporary scientists written for primary/middle school children in relation to three dimensions: characteristics of scientists, nature and process of scientific knowledge, and social…

Purpose: Sentence completion exercises require students to give open-ended responses to prompts. The first purpose of this article is to describe the method of sentence completion to assess middle-school children's attitudes and beliefs about aging. The second purpose is to describe the patterns of characteristics that children associate with…

Community-level factors such as disadvantage, disorder, and disorganization have been linked to a variety of antisocial and illicit activities. Although crime and deviance tend to concentrate in areas with these characteristics, not all residents of disorganized neighborhoods participate in proscribed activities. This study examines the…

In this article, the authors explore the sources of gender variations in African American middle school students' academic performance. The roots of Black males' underachievement are of particular interest. Because middle schools are essential links in the sequence of opportunities to learn, it is imperative to understand the social and…

Middle school subjects of 13-21 years (from 4 nationalities) were used for studying the relationship between progressive cognition and personality characteristics by Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices and Eysenk's Personality Questionnaire. The results showed: (1) the correlation and stepwise regression were completely identical: P score was…

The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) is a large-scale, national longitudinal study designed and sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), with support from other government agencies. Beginning in the spring of 1988 with a cohort of eighth graders (25,000) attending public and private schools across…