Aggression, deviance, and personality adaptation as antecedents and consequences of alienation and involvement in high school.

Alienation from, or involvement in, the social and educational systems of the high school are investigated in an effort to determine the extent that school experiences may influence aggressive and deviant behavior in school and personality styles or orientations. Drawing upon longitudinal data collected from 250 boys followed from grades 8 through 12, potential antecedent-consequence relationships between dimensions of alienation and involvement and these two basic types of student outcomes are examined by cross-lagged panel analyses. Differences between cross-lagged panel correlations provide evidence that student reactions and attachments to school manifest relationships with aggression, deviance, and personality, serving as both antecedents and consequences of these student adaptations. The major findings provide evidence that (1) boys who more frequently break school rules and engage in aggressive or deviant behavior may often come to have more negative attitudes toward school staff and less involvement in school; and (2) student involvement and participation in school life can influence certain aspects of adolescent personality. Possible evidence of reciprocal causation is presented and discussed, as are additional theoretical and methodological implications of the data.

Low adolescent self-esteem leads to multiple interpersonal problems: a test a social-adaptation theory.

This article reports the results of a study that annually monitored the self-esteem and interpersonal problems of over 100 boys during their sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school. Cross-lagged panel correlation differences show that low self-esteem leads to interpersonal problems in all three time lags when multiple interpersonal problems constitute the dependent variable but not when single interpersonal problem criteria constitute the dependent variable. These results are interpreted as supporting social-adaptation theory rather than self-perception theory. Implications for the conceptual status of personality variables as causal antecedents and for the assessment of individual differences are discussed.

School crime and disruption as a function of student-school fit: An empirical assessment.

A theoretical model is described which conceptualizes school crime and disruption as a function of the congruence or fit between the personal characteristics of students and the social environments of the schools they attend. In a direct empirical test of the model, indices representing 10 distinct dimensions of student-school fit are related to three composite measures of school misconduct: school crime, school avoidance, and class misbehavior. A number of significant relationships are found between dimensions of student-school fit and the three indices of school misbehavior, several of which manifest one of the nonlinear forms specified by the model, providing at least modest support for a person-environment fit theory of school crime and disruption.