Studies that included either gender or race in assessing the nature of friendships for children and adolescents were reviewed. Findings indicate that a sex and race cleavage in friendships is evident from the preschool years and persists throughout adolescence. Girls have more reciprocated and intimate friendships than boys, especially during…

This instructor's manual presents a course designed to help the child care worker gain a better understanding of normal adolescent development, by focusing on adolescent behavior and developmental tasks, and by exploring ways in which adolescents may accomplish these developmental tasks. The manual is divided into four sessions which may involve 1…

Kirsten Cole, the Director of FUN (Family University) Afterschool Program at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus, shares her experience of working with children in an afterschool program where nightly community meetings address topics the children want to discuss. The topics change, but the underlying themes are often the same: issues of…

This study centers on the difficulties experienced by many students in making the transition from secondary school to university. The experimental program involved assigning incoming freshmen to small groups led by upperclass honors students. The groups met at least once weekly, with the senior student acting as resource person to encourage the…

Feminist awareness of sexism is leading to a re-evaluation of the importance of women's relationships with each other and to a new awareness that in those relationships there is an enormous potential for mutual support. But women's relationships with women have not only been based on the unconscious assumption of a shared second rate status, they…

This study examined developmental changes in children's own-race and cross-race sociometric ratings, using a longitudinal design. Subjects were 38 black and 116 white children. They were tested in third grade in 1973 and again in sixth grade in 1976. These children had experienced racially integrated education from kindergarten onward. In…

Results of two studies use an instrument, Youth Research Survey, to measure the effectiveness of religious education in the lives of students and its relationship to their psychological development. (Author/ND)

Results from this small scale sociometric study suggest that after seven years of busing in one Midwest community, friendship across race has not substantially improved. Whether busing produces anything of value is questioned. (AM)

Research supported in part by Office of Economic Opportunity contract No. IED 1-66-12.

Interactions between husbands and wives are often assessed in terms of power distribution, based on decision-making outcomes. To examine the association of the dominance of "spouse" over "parents" and "peers" orientation with perceived behavioral and affective mutuality in the couple's financial management, couples…

The Children's Perception of Support Inventory (CPSI) which assesses the extent to which children perceive their families and peer networks as understanding, responsive, and supportive is described. This measure was constructed (1) to differentiate children on family and peer-support scales and to demonstrate the relationship between the…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

Research indicates substantial evidence that, compared with competition, cooperation increases mutual friendliness and contact between individuals. The effects of cooperative and competitive experiences on the structure of student cliques in the classroom were examined. Seven classrooms of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students (N=117) were…

Alienation is experienced by adolescents in varying degrees; however, little research has investigated alienation in relationship to Greek sorority/fraternity membership versus independent status among college students. To measure alienation among freshmen sorority members and freshmen independents in a small women's college, 60 women completed…

As new treatments allow chronically ill children to live longer, the relationship between the child's psychological state and his physical condition becomes paramount. Diabetics (N=42) between the ages of 10 and 21 answered questions about their disease. While most respondents did not feel that diabetes had affected relationships with peers,…