Background: Parents' beliefs about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination influence whether they allow their daughters to be vaccinated. We examined the association between parents' refusal and sociodemographic background, knowledge and beliefs about HPV, and the HPV vaccination in relation to the Health Belief Model. Methods: The sample consisted…

Variance in interest and engagement by gender is a complex and long-standing research agenda in the field of technology education. Studies report that girls are more reluctant to participate in technology education, less interested in the subject and more negative towards technology than boys. It is argued that specific attitudes and roles hinder…

The present article approaches the phenomenon of indirect bullying through detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preadolescent girls make use of as they reconstruct the social organization of their peer group, the effect being that one girl is eventually excluded. The data are drawn from ethnography combined with video…

The purpose of this study was to describe 12-year-old girls' experiences of entering puberty. A qualitative approach was used to gather data from focus group interviews, and content analysis was used to identify common themes from the responses of 18 girls. Findings revealed four main themes: (a) growing up--awareness, bodily changes, longing; (b)…

A modern clustering technique was applied to age-10 and age-13 sociometric data with the purpose of identifying longitudinally stable peer status clusters. The study included 445 girls from a Swedish longitudinal study. The identified temporally stable clusters of rejected, popular, and average girls were essentially larger than corresponding…

This longitudinal study examined the relation between stable sociometric status among same-gender classmates at age 10-11 and peer situation and social adjustment at age 15. Rejected, popular, and average groups of both genders (N = 90) were selected from a representative school sample. Rejected boys and girls preserved their low position among…