Journal of Adolescent Research

This study compared adolescents'and parents'reasoning about actual family conflict in individual interviews and family interactions. A sample of 93 adolescents in Grades 5 through 12 and their parents justified actual conflicts in individual interviews and then discussed conflicts together in a Family Social Interaction Task Parents generally treated conflicts as issues of social convention, but they offered more conventional justifications in individual interviews than in family interaction. Adolescents primarily viewed conflicts as issues of personal jurisdiction, but they appealed to personal jurisdiction more in interviews than in family interaction, whereas they offered more prudential/pragmatic justifications in interactions than in interviews. When taking their adolescents'perspectives, parents reasoned about adolescents'personal choice in both interviews and interaction, and adolescents articulated their parents' conventional perspectives; there were more moral and prudential/pragmatic counterarguments in interactions than in interviews. The results are discussed in terms of strategic interactions and adolescent development.

A sample of 1,110 adolescents assessed nine aspects of their relationships with their mother, their father, their best same-sex friend, their most important sibling, and their most important teacher. These aspects were admiration, affection, companionship, conflict, instrumental aid, intimacy, nurturance, reliable alliance, and satisfaction with the relationship. Early adolescents (11 through 13 years of age) gave higher ratings than did middle (14 through 16years ofage) and late (17 through 19years ofage) adolescents for all relationships on most attributes. Except for intimacy and nurturance, middle adolescents' ratings were higher than those of late adolescents but only for some relationships. The observed trends are interpreted with respect to several social, socialcognitive, and cognitive changes taking place over the span of adolescence.

The validity of a self-report measure of emotional support, the Perceived Emotionall Personal Support Scale (PEPSS), was investigated in two studies of middle and late adolescents. The PEPSS asks respondents to nominate nine social network members and then to rate each of these relationships on four emotional support items. Factor-analytic techniques were used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed subscale structure of the measure, and both the predictive and the concurrent validity of PEPSS subscales were investigated. Weak but significant correlations were found between family support and a measure of depressive symptoms completed 6 months later. Family and friend subscales of the PEPSS were highly correlated with the family and friend sections of another measure of perceived emotional support. Results of the two studies suggest that the PEPSS may be a useful research instrument for future investigations of emotional support from family members and friends among adolescents.

In this study, adolescents' reasoning about drug use was investigated from a social-cognitive perspective. In an interview and classification task, adolescents were asked to (a) evaluate drug use in comparison to other social and moral transgressions; (b) distinguish between soft and hard legal and illegal drugs; (c) conceptualize drug use in relation to acts of self-harm, such as suicide; (d) weigh legal, societal, physical, and psychological consequences of drug use; and (e) evaluate authorities' jurisdictions to prohibit drug use. Sixty adolescents, evenly divided between males and females, in Grades 10, 11, and 12 participated. Age and gender differences emerged regarding adolescents' judgments about drug use and whether individuals have the right to harm themselves. The findings have implications for research on adolescent social reasoning and for drug education programs.

This article examines how adolescents cope with different types of anger-provoking situations. Also explored is the degree to which coping changes or remains the same across different situations. Results showed that focusing-on-the-positive coping was negatively associated with anger reactivity in the face of both affiliation and achievement stress. In addition, individuals who engaged in wishful thinking coping in dealing with angerprovoking interpersonal stressors showed exaggerated anger reactivity, whereas seeking social support was positively related to anger reactivity in the context of stressful situations that threatened achievement needs. Results supported the notion that the emotional consequences of being exposed to stressful anger provocations may be mediated by individual differences in coping, and that the adaptiveness or maladaptiveness of some coping strategies depends on contextual factors such as the nature of the stressor. Moreover, the present data also supported the conceptualization of coping as a dynamic, situation-sensitive process.

Career choices and their relation to personal and family background variables were studied in a sample of 148 children (68 females and 80 males) at two points in time: when the participants were between 8 and 13 years of age (Phase 1) and approximately S years later, when they were between 13 and 18 years of age (Phase 2). Male andfemale respondents during both phases chose largely nonoverlapping careers. Boys' choices were heavily gender-stereotyped during both developmental periods. In contrast over one quarter of the females during Phase 1 and close to one half during Phase 2 chose male-dominated occupations. Boys' ideal and realistic career choices did not differ in the degree to which they were gender-typed. Girls'realistic career nominations, however, included a significantly higher percentage of female incumbents in the labor force than did their ideal choices. Gender differences in career choices were not accompanied by differences in several family background and personal variables except for the desire to parent a child and pursue a full-time career.