Adolescents newly diagnosed with cancer must navigate medical, psychosocial, and educational issues when confronting and coping with this life-threatening illness. Frequent hospitalizations, intense therapy, and continual medical appointments disrupt attendance at school, social, and community events. Decreased school participation and attendance…

A sense of belonging for any young person is core to the human experience--it encompasses how much a student feels accepted, respected, and included at school and in other contexts. For youth, adolescence is a time of exploration and one where they naturally wrestle with questions of belonging and sense of self as they transition to emerging…

Constructing school spaces where Black girls feel comfortable enough to be their full selves is essential in a system that consistently shows them that they do not matter. Cultivating these spaces, however, requires educators to understand that Black girls' identities are multiple and varied, that Black girls can be anything. Still, some identity…

Bringing more girls and women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, is often highlighted as an aim in education and industry. A constantly growing body of research on engagement is driven by equity concerns caused by the unbalanced gender distribution in STEM. In this study, Swedish teenage girls on a three-day technology…

Absence from school, especially frequent or prolonged absence, is acknowledged as a potential factor in school dropout and suboptimal academic achievement. The issue of absence from school took on added significance in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, which resulted in schooling interruptions in several jurisdictions. However, there is…

The underperformance of African American males compared to their white counterparts in educational settings has been a long-standing research subject. Researchers have employed several lenses with which to view this phenomenon. Ogbu (2004) claimed that African American students are more likely to possess anti-school attitudes, which ultimately…

Perceived social support can help immigrant youth to deal with developmental acculturation: the simultaneous resolution of developmental and acculturative tasks. This person-oriented three-wave comparative study investigated perceived social support trajectories in two immigrant and one non-immigrant group. We investigated whether similar social…

Societal belongingness -- feelings of being a connected, an affiliated, and a respected member of the larger society -- may contribute to the understanding of adolescent development both as a person and a member of society in a multicultural context. The current study examined the psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the…

Children and adolescents benefit from positive intergroup peer interactions, but they are unlikely to have many opportunities for these interactions if their parents are uncomfortable with them. Drawing primarily on social identity theory (SIT), this study investigated how U.S. parents' (N = 569) comfort with their children's potential intergroup…

Adolescents with emotional and behavioural disorders (EBD) continue to struggle in the school environment. They may have difficulty connecting to their school environment as their engagement in challenging behaviour may have led to frequent school removal and high rates of school dropout, resulting in a breakdown of their school connectedness. The…

The goal of this literature review was to identify evidence-based curricula that support youth mental health with special attention to inclusion of access, equity, and belonging (AEB). Four databases were searched for peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2019 related to youth mental health curricula. A total of 1446 articles were…

Given the high number of refugee children and adolescents around the globe, it is critical to determine conditions that foster their adaptation in the receiving country. This study investigated the psychological adaptation of recently arrived adolescent refugees in Germany. We focused on whether psychological adaptation reflects the organizational…

Children who are excluded from school may end up being excluded from other social institutions. Yet little research has considered whether low school belonging is a risk factor for not being in education, employment, or training after graduation. Using two longitudinal cohorts from Australia (N = 14,082; 51% Boys), we explored this relationship.…

Background: Children and adolescents in residential care have more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) than those living in any other type of care. However, there is scant research on risk factors accounting for this accumulation. Objective: To establish the prevalence of ACEs in child residential care and to explore predictors of accumulation…

Psychological attitudes about social status hierarchies and social mobility often reflect stereotypic expectations about competencies and entitlements based on inequalities. Children who experience exclusion based on social class are at risk of experiencing a lack of opportunities, contributing to societal disparities. Recently, developmental…