Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager's first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in "The First Year Out", teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after…

The concept of behavior settings--the environments shaping individual behavior--was originated by Roger Barker in 1950 in connection with his community surveys in a small Kansas town, code-named Midwest. This book seeks to provide rural social scientists with an understanding of Barker's eco-behavioral approach and proposed adaptations of it to…

How games influence the psychological and social development of children is examined. It is pointed out that the current emphasis on competition and winning at all costs is harmful and that competition is not instinctive but a learned response to society's expectations. Other cultures such as the Eskimo and Chinese are presented as examples of…

Core ideas in the discipline of social psychology are examined in this publication. Social psychology is the study of social behavior based upon individual psychological attributes or personality. An individual's personality can be thought of as inner states of readiness which predispose a person to respond in certain ways in social situations. A…

Trends in secondary-level behavioral science curriculum development, informational background, and strategies for teaching behavioral science concepts are provided in this book. Chapters one through three define the behavioral sciences and examine their changing role and status in social studies education. Chapters four through six develop…

Many children are targets of verbal and physical abuse or social ostracism at some point during their school careers, and a minority are repeatedly victimized by their peers. This volume brings together leading investigators to present the latest psychological research on chronically victimized children and adolescents. The book's introduction…

This study deals with attributional theory, a factor of special concern in achievement theory, which focuses on specific behavior as caused by the subject's attributions to the perceived causes of such behavior. This study investigated whether an individual's attributional biases were predictive of task selections he or she made. Furthermore, it…

This book focuses on transitions into young adulthood by examining key roles and experiences of young adults and how they relate to changes in drug use. The findings are based on the nationwide Monitoring the Future project, and represent the majority of individuals who entered young adulthood in the United States during the years 1976 through…