This study explores young people's arts participation through music-making in Finland and the factors that may regulate that participation. It seeks to understand the construction of active modes of arts participation in and through adolescents' musical life courses. The interview study was conducted with young people (N = 18) participating in…

The purpose of this study is to examine profiles of students' attitudes toward citizenship norms and inclusiveness in the political process, focusing on changes in the frequency of particular profiles and in the strength of predictors across a decade. Using data from 16 countries participating in the 1999 and 2009 International Association for the…

This study investigated whether a country's policy context for immigrant integration was related to native adolescents' attitudes towards ethnic minorities in European countries, using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. We found that students in a country with more inclusive and multiculturalist policies for…

Children explore their environment through experiences and each experience is meaningful in developing their environmental consciousness and identity. On the basis of the drawn landscape experiences, the present qualitative study set out to find out what landscapes the participating students deemed worth conserving. The data consisted of the…

Sexting is one of the recurring causes of concern in public discussion of young people and network media. This paper builds on findings from a survey with 1269 Finnish female respondents aged 11-18 conducted using a popular online community for girls on their experiences of and views on online messages concerning sex and sexuality. Sixty-five per…

This study focuses on migrant adolescents' perspective on history education with special reference to their families' home country. The data consist of qualitative interviews with 36 students from various migrant groups (aged 14-16 years). The history of the home country seemed to be significant for the students and they would have wanted to hear…

This study investigated friend influence over adolescent schoolwork engagement in 160 same-sex friend dyads (94 female dyads and 66 male dyads). Participants were approximately 16 years of age at the outset. Each friend described his or her own schoolwork engagement, school burnout, and perceptions of maternal affection. The results revealed that…

Finnish national data sets on schools (N = 496) and pupils (N = 74,143; 14-16 years) were used to study whether a systematic documenting policy for the violations of school smoking bans was associated with pupils' smoking and their perceptions on the enforcement of smoking bans. Attending a school with a systematic documenting policy was…

We examined how Finnish adolescents' fears for their future changed over a quarter of a century and how these changes reflect transformations of the adolescents' key contexts from the late-modernist perspective. Nationally representative samples of 12-, 14-, 16-, and 18-year-olds in 1983, 1997, and 2007 were surveyed using mailed questionnaires…

The purpose of this person-oriented, 5-wave longitudinal study was to examine the trajectories of educational expectations from adolescence to young adulthood in the context of the expectancy-value theory (Eccles et al., 1983). Altogether, 853 (48% female; M age = 16 years) Finnish adolescents reported their educational expectation, 1st in the…

As the 21st century unfolds, the United States faces historic challenges, including a struggling economy, an aging infrastructure and global terrorism. Solutions will have to come from educated, skilled citizens who understand and believe in our democratic system and are civically engaged. This incisive new report examines these fault lines and…

With the growing interest in the development of purpose in youth, one important role that requires attention is the school teacher. The current article explores student perceptions of the role teachers can play in fostering purpose in their students in the mid- and late adolescent years, and the teacher competencies that facilitate purpose…

Based on original empirical data collected from adolescents in Europe (N = 9003) this paper focuses the lifeworlds of young people. It analyses negative and positive patterns of attitude and combines them with further concepts: personal life perspectives, various key values and political attitudes. Technically, the attitude towards Europe acts as…

This qualitative narrative study examined contraceptive use and non-use in light of the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The purpose of this paper was to understand contraceptive use and non-use among Finnish teenage girls: why do girls use or not use contraception in a sexually motivated situation and how do the determinants of the Theory of Planned…

This paper examines whether the relationship between parental work and adolescents' well-being would be mediated through parenting behaviour. The primary focus was on the experiences of adolescents. Questionnaire-based data from families (both parents and one children, n=77) and adolescents (n=126) were collected in Finland in 2000 and 2001,…