Greater empirical attention directed toward gender-sensitive assessment strategies that concentrate on family-specific factors is thought to be both timely and necessary, especially with regard to outcome variables associated with mental health and substance abuse in at-risk adolescent populations. A sample of 2,646 court-involved adolescents was…

The purpose of this validity study was to improve measurement of coaching efficacy, an important variable in models of coaching effectiveness. A revised version of the coaching efficacy scale (CES) was developed for head coaches of high school teams (CES II-HST). Data were collected from head coaches of 14 relevant high school sports (N = 799).…

The cultural capital in families, more specifically, the educational level of parents, has during the last decades been shown to be the most important dimension of socioeconomic influence on school performance in many countries. Less is known about the factors that actually mediate this influence. The aim, therefore, is to investigate the relative…

This study examines the contribution of the "Responsive Classroom" (RC) Approach, a set of teaching practices that integrate social and academic learning, to children's perceptions of their classroom, and children's academic and social performance over time. Three questions emerge: (a) What is the concurrent and cumulative relation between…

Early coital debut is a risk factor for HIV. In this paper we investigate the predictors of young adolescents' transition to first intercourse using a social cognition theoretical framework. The analyses reported here were based on a longitudinal study of 2360 students in the schools allocated to the control arm of a cluster-randomized controlled…

We examine the prediction of individuals' educational and occupational success at age 48 from contextual and personal variables assessed during their middle childhood and late adolescence. We focus particularly on the predictive role of the parents' educational level during middle childhood, controlling for other indices of socioeconomic status…

The purpose of this study was to explore how social support, mother's psychological status, and maternal sensitivity affected attachment security in children with disabilities by using the structural equation model (SEM). Subjects were 141 pairs of children with disabilities and theirs mothers. Empirical data was obtained through a series of…

In recognition of the multiple pathways through which family and peer systems are linked, this short-term longitudinal study tested a tripartite model of family-peer relationships. One hundred fifty-nine fourth-grade children (82 boys, 77 girls) and their parents participated in a study of the links between parent behaviors and children's peer…

In this study, two longitudinal models of early adolescent risky sexual behaviors (RSB) were compared using a pooled sample of 267 Canadian and Italian adolescents (55% females; 53% Canadians) assessed yearly from grade 8 to 10. We focused on parenting practices (monitoring, control, limit setting), adolescent problem behaviors (antisocial…

The common factor model assumes that the linear coefficients (intercepts and factor loadings) linking the observed variables to the latent factors are fixed coefficients (i.e., common for all participants). When the observed variables are participants' observed responses to stimuli, such as their responses to the items of a questionnaire, the …

This study investigated the benefits of creating item "testlets" or "parcels" in the context of structural equation modeling confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Testlets are defined as groups of items related to a single content area that is developed as a unit. The strategy is illustrated using data from the administration of…

This paper illustrates the differences in inference that can be seen when traditional and multilevel structural equation modeling techniques are applied to hierarchical data. Research on faculty is an area in which multilevel data exist, and where previous research generally has not modeled the nested structure. Using data from the National Study…

Demonstrated, through simulation, that stationary autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models may be fitted readily when T>N, using normal theory raw maximum likelihood structural equation modeling. Also provides some illustrations based on real data. (SLD)

Proposed a method for extending the Bollen-Stine bootstrap model (K. Bollen and R. Stine, 1992) fit to structural equation models with missing data. Developed a Statistical Analysis System macro program to implement this procedure, and assessed its usefulness in a simulation. The new method yielded model rejection rates close to the nominal 5%…

Presents KANT, a FORTRAN 77 software program that tests assumptions of multivariate normality in a data set. Based on the test developed by M. V. Mardia (1985), the KANT program is useful for those engaged in structural equation modeling with latent variables. (SLD)