Better relationships do not always feel better: Social relationships interact in predicting negative emotions in early adolescence.

How negatively young adolescents feel is central to their well-being. Intuitively, better social relationships should be linked to less negative emotions. This study tested this assumption, using a sample of over 80,000 young adolescents from 32 countries (ages 10-12). Inconsistent with the notion that better social relationships are always related to better emotional experiences, we found that links between negative emotions and adolescents' relationships with friends or teachers critically depend on their relationships with family. When young adolescents had relatively better relationships with family, better relationships with friends or teachers predicted less negative emotions. However, when adolescents had relatively poorer relationships with family, better relationships with friends or teachers predicted more negative emotions. Results were consistent across adolescents' gender, age, culture, or socioeconomic status. Findings suggest that the broader social context should be considered for understanding how specific relationships predict negative emotions in early adolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Satisfaction with the Neighborhood of Israeli and Chilean Children and its Effects on their Subjective Well-being.

A study of subjective well-being in 4,942 children (49% girls) aged 10 and 12 living in Israel and Chile is presented. The association between perceptions of the neighborhood and subjective well-being (SWB) was analyzed based on a mediation model using satisfaction with the neighborhood as a mediating variable. The overall results showed high average SWB scores for both countries as well as high levels of satisfaction with the neighborhoods where they live. Differences between the countries were observed for the age groups. The SWB of Chilean children decreased with age, while a decrease was not detected for the Israeli children. The mediation model had excellent fit for the age groups and countries, and the satisfaction with the neighborhood variable presents a partial mediation effect between neighborhood variables and SWB. Satisfaction with the neighborhood displayed a greater effect on the SWB of the older children than the younger ones. Gender showed significant effects on SWB only in Chile. The results are discussed, analyzing the similarities and differences between both countries and providing new evidence for the study of SWB at the international level. Questions for a more specific analysis of SWB within each country are suggested.

Adherence to emotion norms is greater in individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures.

It is generally assumed that there is greater pressure to conform to social norms in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures. However, most research on cultural differences in social norms has examined norms for behaviors. Here, we examine cultural differences in norms for emotions. Relative to members of collectivist cultures, members of individualist cultures are more attuned to internal states and value them more. Therefore, we predicted that adherence to emotion norms would be greater in individualist than in collectivist cultures. In four studies with 119 samples from 69 distinct countries and over 200,000 participants, we estimated adherence to emotion norms in different cultures, and how deviation from emotion norms is associated with life satisfaction. As predicted, in countries higher in individualism, emotional experiences of individuals were more homogenous and more concordant with the emotions of others in their culture. Furthermore, in more individualist countries, deviation from the mean emotional experience was linked to lower life satisfaction. We discuss two complementary mechanisms that may underlie such differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's participation: A new role for children in the field of child maltreatment.

The common image of children as vulnerable and needing protection has been destabilized over the past decades. The ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC) has promoted the concepts of children's rights and of children as active citizens who can make decisions about their best interests. Although the CRC encompasses the three P's approach: participation, protection and provision, questions remain as to the interactions of these rights, especially how they can supplement each other and contribute to better well-being for children. This interaction is especially relevant in cases of children in vulnerable situations, such as maltreatment. Over the years the professional discourse on child maltreatment has been focused mostly on protection and provision. Here we discuss the interaction between protection of maltreated children and their participation. Five aspects of child participation in the field of child maltreatment will be presented: children's participation in the definition of child maltreatment phenomena; children's participation in measuring the prevalence of child maltreatment; children's participation in clinical assessments; children's participation in in the decision-making process in child protection system; and children's participation in the efforts to prevent child maltreatment.

Hope, Material Resources, and Subjective Well-Being of 8- to 12-Year-Old Children in Israel.

Few studies have examined the links among hope, material resources, and subjective well-being (SWB) of children from their own perspectives. The article examines lack of material resources as a risk factor, hope as a human strength, and a possible moderator regarding children's SWB. The study employed a nationally representative sample of 2,977 Jewish and Arab Israeli children (ages 8-12). As predicted, there was a significant positive relation between hope and SWB, and a negative relation between lack of material resources and SWB. Hope was found to moderate the relation between lack of material resources and SWB. Furthermore, for 10- and 12-year olds, differences were found regarding the strength of the relations of the variables, suggesting a possible developmental trend.

How subjective well-being is associated with material deprivation and social exclusion in Israeli 12-year-olds.

The literature examining the relations between economic situation and happiness has focused almost exclusively on a household's income as a proxy for economic situation and, accordingly, also focused chiefly on the adult population, excluding children and adolescents. To fill this gap, this study examines the relation between economic deprivation and happiness by using 2 alternative proxies: material deprivation and social exclusion. The study tests the relation of these measures to the most common measure for happiness-subjective well-being (SWB)-in a sample of Israeli 12-year-olds (N = 1,081). The study also examines the effects of culture and life circumstances on these complex relations. Findings show that both material deprivation and social exclusion are negatively associated with children's SWB. Social exclusion explained a much larger percentage of children's SWB, adding up to 20%. Furthermore, children who were identified as materially deprived and socially excluded were found to be at much greater risk for unhappiness. Material deprivation was found to be significantly more important to the SWB of males compared with females, and for Jews compared with Arabs. Finally, some implications for social policy and regarding the relation of economic situation and happiness are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

What children think about their rights and their well-being: A cross-national comparison.

Recent years have brought a growing social and public commitment to the promotion of children's rights and children's well-being around the world, and these have become important goals of all those striving to improve children's lives. In spite of the intimate ideological connection between the concepts of children's rights and children's well-being, they have evolved separately both theoretically and empirically. In the current article, we present a study exploring the empirical association between these 2 concepts based on data from the International Survey on Children's Well-Being. This unique survey explores children's own perspectives on their well-being (subjective well-being), their perceptions and knowledge of their rights, and their reports on their right to participation. It includes data from more than 54,000 children aged 8-12 from 16 countries around the world. Our results showed clear cross-national differences between children's knowledge and perceptions of their rights and their reports on participation. Also, children's participation in different contexts in their lives showed an association with their subjective well-being; a weaker association was found between children's knowledge and perceptions of their rights. These results indicate that children's right to participation and, to some degree, their knowledge and thinking about their rights is an indicator of their well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Cultural Adaptation of a Community-Based Child Maltreatment Prevention Initiative.

A unique primary prevention effort, Strong Communities for Children (Strong Communities), focuses on changing attitudes and expectations regarding communities' collective responsibilities for the safety of children. Findings from a 6-year pilot of the initiative in South Carolina have shown promise in reducing child maltreatment, but efforts to adapt the initiative to different cultural contexts have been lacking. No models exist for adapting an initiative that takes a community-level approach to ensuring children's safety. Thus, this article addresses the gap by providing an overview of the original initiative, how the initiative was adapted to the Israeli context, and lessons learned from the experience. Building on conceptualizations of cultural adaptation by Castro et al. (Prevention Science, 5, 2004, 41) and Resnicow et al. (Ethnicity and Disease, 9, 1999, 11), sources of nonfit (i.e., sociodemographic traits, political conflict, government services, and the presence and role of community organizations) were identified and deep and surface structure modifications were made to the content and delivery. Ultimately, this article describes the adaption and dissemination of a community-based child maltreatment prevention initiative in Tel Aviv, Israel, and addresses researchers' calls for more publications describing the adaptation of interventions and the procedures that need to be implemented to achieve cultural relevance.

Strong Communities for Children: Results of a multi-year community-based initiative to protect children from harm.

This article reports the evaluation results from Strong Communities for Children, a multi-year comprehensive community-based initiative to prevent child maltreatment and improve children's safety. The outcome study consisted of a survey of a random sample of caregivers of children under age 10 in the Strong Communities service area and a set of comparison communities matched at the block group level on demography. Survey data were collected in two waves 4 years apart. Data were collected on (a) perceptions of the neighborhood and neighbors (e.g., neighboring, collective efficacy), (b) perceptions of neighbors' parenting practices, (c) parental attitudes and beliefs (e.g., parental stress; parental efficacy), and (d) self-reported parenting practices. The survey data were supplemented by data on substantiated reported rates of child abuse and neglect per 1,000 children and ICD-9 coded child injuries suggesting child abuse and neglect per 1,000 children. Compared to the non-intervention sample across time, the Strong Communities samples showed significant changes in the expected direction for social support, collective efficacy, child safety in the home, observed parenting practices, parental stress, parental efficacy, self-reported parenting practices, rates of officially substantiated child maltreatment, and rates of ICD-9 coded child injuries suggesting child maltreatment. These promising results, obtained through multiple methods of evaluation, confirm that a community mobilization strategy can shift norms of parents' care for their children and neighbors' support for one another, so that young children are safer at home and in the community. Replications should be undertaken and evaluated in other communities under diverse auspices.

Community characteristics, social service allocation, and child maltreatment reporting.

This study expands research on the relationship between community (defined here as a locality) characteristics and child maltreatment. Research in this field is not new, but it is scarce. Our study is unique by examining changes between two periods rather than focusing on one point in time. Furthermore, our study examines structural conditions in small and medium size localities in Israel, a non-Western and non-Christian society. We compare our results with those from studies on inner-city and suburban neighborhoods in Western countries and earlier studies in Israel. We collected data on 169 Israeli localities, ranging from small ones (with as few as 1,500 residents) to medium size localities (i.e., towns) (with as many as 50,000 residents) in which approximately 34% of the Israeli child population resides. Our study tested four hypotheses: (1) Socioeconomic characteristics of the locality will be negatively correlated with the availability of social services; (2) Reported child maltreatment rates will be negatively correlated with the socioeconomic characteristics of the locality; (3) The availability of social services will be positively correlated with reported child maltreatment rates; and (4) Overall reported child maltreatment rates will be negatively correlated with the overall status of the localities. We have supported our second and third hypothesis in full, and partially supported our first and fourth hypothesis. In particular we have demonstrated that while demographics play a different role in Israel than in other countries in regard to child maltreatment, social, economic and cultural context are crucial for understating reported rates of child maltreatment.

Advances in children's rights and children's well-being measurement: implications for school psychologists.

Recent years have brought important changes to the profession of school psychology, influenced by larger social, scientific, and political trends. These trends include the emergence of children's rights agenda and advances in children's well-being measurement. During these years, a growing public attention and commitment to the notion of children's rights has developed, which is best expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention outlines the conditions necessary to ensure and promote children's well-being and calls for the ongoing monitoring of children's well-being for accountability purposes. We articulate advances in children's rights and children's well-being measurement in the context of children's schooling experiences in general and for school psychology in particular. We highlight implications for the assessment roles of school psychologists, who occupy a unique position at the intersection of multiple subsystems of children's overall ecosystems. We argue that the synergy between a rights-based agenda and advances in children's well-being assessment methodology can provide valuable opportunities for school psychology. This synergy can help school communities establish perspective and goals for children's well-being in rights respecting ways, using the most promising well-being assessment strategies.

An ecological approach to children's rights and participation: interrelationships and correlates of rights in different ecological systems.

Current knowledge emphasizes either a developmental or a cultural/contextual theoretical framework for understanding children's approaches to the concepts of rights and participation. This study, carried out among 1,753 Israeli adolescents (ages 15-17), uses a socioecological perspective instead to understand children's rights and participation. It examines adolescents' approaches to their rights and participation at 4 ecological levels-family, school, community, and the larger sociopolitical system-as well as a number of possible child, family, and societal correlates. It also looks at the interactions between some of these correlates. The findings show that different correlates have different links with various ecological circles. For example, girls reported higher levels of participation in the family and at school, but no significant differences were found between boys and girls in their participation in the community and at civic-political levels. Israeli Palestinians reported higher levels of participation in their schools and at the civic-political level but lower levels of participation in the family and the community compared with their Jewish counterparts. The significant interaction effect between nation and gender showed that, among Arab students, there were larger gaps between boys and girls in the different participation domains than there were among Jewish students. Furthermore, higher rates of participation in the family and lower rates of civic participation were found among students from single-parent families. This study shows that employing an ecological framework to the efforts to understand children's approaches to rights and participation is a first step in the right direction for fostering children's rights and participation.

Socioeconomic correlates of rates of child maltreatment in small communities.

This study expands the research on neighborhood effects and child maltreatment by examining the structural conditions, including religion and nationality, in small towns in Israel. The results are compared with those in inner-city and suburban neighborhoods in Western countries. Five community structural variables were statistically correlated with investigated cases of child maltreatment: adults' unemployment rate, rate of new immigrants, rate of children in single-parent families, population gain or loss, and the community's location in relation to a central city. A multivariate regression analysis of these variables explained 44% of the variance.

Between neighborliness and volunteerism: participants in the strong communities initiative.

The Strong Communities initiative in the Upstate region of South Carolina strives to strengthen the community and prevent child maltreatment through the enhancement of neighborliness and volunteerism. During the first 5 years of the initiative, more than 4,500 volunteers contributed their time. Strong Communities has nurtured neighborly volunteers-residents whose community service could be characterized as being between formal agency-based volunteerism and pure neighborliness (good citizenship). Conducting a phone survey of a random sample of volunteers in Strong Communities and analyzing an existing database on the contributed service, we studied the volunteers' characteristics, attitudes, and perceptions. Volunteers in Strong Communities come from all parts of the community and include a high percentage of minorities. They have a strong psychological sense of neighborliness and commitment to their communities. The volunteers also expressed a high level of integration into Strong Communities in their knowledge, identity, ongoing activities, satisfaction, and attitudes. The Strong Communities initiative appears to be succeeding in making opportunities for neighborly action easily available in everyday life.

Attitudes toward and understanding of children's rights among middle school students in Jerusalem: the role of family values and patterns, nationality, and religion.

Children's rights have become a cornerstone of discussions of human rights and human services around the world. However, the meaning of children's rights and their significance for policies and programs vary across nations, cultures, religions, and families. Only recently has research begun to study the conceptualization of children's rights in non-Western and non-Christian-dominated cultures and, thus, in more traditional and authoritarian families. This article reports on a cross-sectional survey among 810 Jewish and 582 Arab children (372 Muslims, 210 Christians), aged 12-14 from eastern and western Jerusalem to examine how children view their rights. Adolescents completed a structured, anonymous, self-report questionnaire. Results suggest that nationality/ethnicity is a major factor in explaining differences in children's views of their rights, with religion playing a minor role. Results also suggest that family values and practices are significantly correlated with the approach to children's rights, as is gender, although its explanatory power is weaker. These findings should guide practitioners and children's rights advocates as they strive to enhance the support for children's rights in the Middle East and develop appropriate policies.

Generational, ethnic, and national differences in attitudes toward the rights of children in Israel and Palestine.

With the nearly universal ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children's rights have become a cornerstone of discussions in relation to human rights and human services around the world. Although the concept of children's rights is now broadly established, the meaning of this concept and its significance for policies and programs are apt to vary across nations, cultures, religions, and age groups. With the close proximity of diverse national, ethnic, and religious groups and seemingly omnipresent political conflicts about the meaning of rights among them, the Middle East presents unusual opportunities to understand the effects of such variables on attitudes toward children's rights. Drawing from samples of Jews from Israel, Palestinian Muslims from Israel, and Palestinian Muslims from the Palestinian Authority, surveys were conducted of adolescents, young mothers (mothers of toddlers), middle-aged mothers (mothers of adolescents), and grandmothers. Attitudes toward children's rights were more strongly affected by the respondents' ethnicity and nationality than by their age.

The "geography" of child maltreatment in Israel: Findings from a national data set of cases reported to the social services.

OBJECTIVES: This article examines the "geography" of reported cases of child maltreatment in Israel by determining its frequency and rates according to nationality, area of residence, and size and type of locality. METHOD: The study collected data at the local level in Israel based on reports to social services of cases of child maltreatment during 2000; locality is the unit of analysis. RESULTS: The rate of reported cases of child maltreatment was 17.8 per 1,000 children in Israel in 2000. The rates varied, however, among different localities. They were lower in Arab localities (9 per 1,000 children) than in the Jewish ones (20 per 1,000), higher in large cities and other socioeconomic affluent localities (19 per 1,000), and varied according to the geographic area. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates considerable variation in rates of reported cases of child maltreatment by locality and by population makeup. Thus, to fulfill the Israeli legislation of mandatory reporting of any reasonable suspicion of child maltreatment, the state should better develop policies and services that encourage reporting of child maltreatment among the Arab and ultraorthodox populations and in smaller or socioeconomic disadvantaged localities. Furthermore, the social services must build a bridge to the minority populations in Israel, developing their trust in these services and increasing their propensity to use them.