To Örebro University

How parents and adolescents perceive each other’s life values is a key to understanding successful value transmission. In the value socializations literature, it has been proposed that parents’ values become internalized when children correctly perceive their parents’ values and decide to adopt them as their own. In the current study, we propose that interpersonal value perception of broader life values is characterized by a perceptual bias—projection—which propels adolescents to perceive their parents’ values to be similar to their own, and propels parents to perceive their adolescents’ values to be similar to theirs. This cross-sectional study examined 518 dyads of adolescents and their parents. Adolescents rated how important different humanistic, environmental, and achievement values were to them, and how important these values were to their parents. Parents similarly rated how important these values were to them and to their adolescents. Using structural equation modeling, an interpersonal value perception model was constructed that estimated how much parents and adolescents projected their own values when perceiving each other’s values. The results supported the idea that both parents and adolescents substantially project their own values when perceiving the others’ values, and that they perceive the others’ values with low accuracy. We discuss our findings in light of value socialization in both research and practice.

The role played by the Internet in young people’s political lives has received great research attention. However, two gaps in the literature hinder the drawing of conclusions on how online political participation is related to its offline counterpart. First, although there are multiple hypotheses on the nature of the relationship, they have not been compared in any single study. Second, although the relation may differ according to developmental stage, age differences have not been examined. We address these gaps using longitudinal data from two samples of youth at different developmental stages, and test four hypotheses for each sample. It was found, among late adolescents, that online participation serves as a gateway to offline participation. However, among young adults, offline participation spills over into online participation. These findings indicate the positive potential of online political participation in youth’s political lives, and highlight the need to focus on their developmental stages.

This paper explores the relationship between social engagement and motivation to share knowledge in a hybrid college class using a web infused curriculum. Online social engagement, operationalized through concepts such as connectivity, social presence and social space has been an important topic of research in web based education for more than a decade. An important sub-text of this research is that online social engagement supports higher levels of collaboration. Students who feel comfortable with and connected to their online learning community are much more likely to be active participants in that community, working together to develop and build knowledge systems. Much of this research refers to the more social/participatory based educational theories of John Dewey and L.S. Vygotsky. There is though a second component of collaboration that helps drive community building in this theoretical frameworks; motivation to engage in a shared, relevant, goal oriented activity. While most theories on social engagement assume natural relationships between online social engagement and motivation to participate in a community, this relationship is not often discussed and examined very often. This paper specifically compares the relationship between classroom connectedness and motivation to share knowledge between students in a hybrid, web infused class and a more traditionally oriented class with a small web component. Analysis did find a highly significant relationship between connectedness and motivation to share knowledge in the hybrid class but not in the traditional class, suggesting an important relationship, but one based at least partially in targeted experience. 

This paper examined the effects of a blogging centered curriculum on the development of Internet self-efficacy of students taking a general education class. The class used a hybrid model (in class and online) that both integrated and strongly encouraged blogging on a community style, open source blog. The curriculum was designed to both create a more distributed educational structure and to develop greater autonomy and participation in student activity. It was hypothesized that as students engaged in increasingly complex Internet activities they would develop greater strength in Internet self-efficacy in organization and differentiation of information and reaction to and generation of information. 367 undergraduate students participated in the current study. A pre-, post-test format was used to measure whether there were significant changes in strength of Internet self-efficacy, with the inclusion of a control group of a more traditionally-structured class. The results showed that a blogcentric course has impacts on the increases in students' Internet self-efficacy, particularly for reactive/generative self-efficacy. The findings are discussed in light of potential implications on the future direction of education. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Homeless youth are a vulnerable and understudied group who has consistently reported elevated levels of substance use. Understanding the factors associated with substance use within this population may help guide future intervention efforts. Although few studies have examined the role of abstinence selfefficacy and coping in substance use among homeless youth, some research indicates that higher abstinence self-efficacy and greater use of task-oriented coping are related to lower substance use, while greater use of emotion-oriented and avoidance-oriented coping are related to higher substance use. Accordingly, the current study examined the relationship between abstinence self-efficacy, coping, and substance use among homeless youth, while controlling for the effects of age, gender, and ethnicity. A sample of 40 homeless youth (ages 17 to 24) was recruited from the only drop-in center in a Midwestern city. Data were obtained at one point in time, and included information regarding abstinence self-efficacy, coping, and frequency of alcohol and drug use. A series of hierarchical regression analyses were conducted. In order to control for the effects of age, gender, and ethnicity, these variables were entered in the first step, and abstinence self-efficacy and coping were included in the second step of analysis. A significant relationship was found between abstinence self-efficacy and alcohol and drug use. Specifically, higher abstinence self-efficacy was related to lower alcohol and drug use. Additionally, an interaction between abstinence self-iiiefficacy and substance use was found in which African American, compared to nonAfrican-American youth, reported reduced alcohol use as their level of abstinence self-efficacy in social pressure to use increased. However, coping was not associated with substance use. The current study provides empirical support for the relationship between abstinence self-efficacy and substance use among homeless youth. The findings have practical implications. Although a longitudinal design and an intervention trial is needed to confirm, increasing abstinence self-efficacy through intervention efforts may be an effective strategy for reducing substance use among these youth.

Follow-up rates reported among longitudinal studies that focus on runaway adolescents and their families are relatively low. Identifying factors associated with follow-up completion might be useful for improving follow-up rates and therefore study validity. The present study explored how individual- and family-level constructs, as well as research project activities, influence the follow-up completion rate among runaway adolescents (N=140) and their primary caregiver. Results showed that follow-up completion rates decreased as the number of research assistants (RA) assigned to each case increased and as participants’ address changes increased. Additionally, among adolescents, more frequent alcohol use was associated with lower follow-up rates. The current findings suggest that researchers should (1) design their research so that one RA is assigned to each specific case, and (2) adjust their retention strategies to account for the differences in follow-up rates based upon the participants’ drug of choice and residential stability.

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