The Journal of Early Adolescence

To explore the structure and function of the aspirations of Latino boys and girls, theoretical and methodological approaches of future orientation and possible selves were integrated. In interviews with 38 students, the content, priority, optimism, internality, temporal extension, and specificity of students’ hoped-for selves were assessed. Students showed high educational and occupational aspirations and high rates of optimism and internal control across five domains of hoped-for selves. The occupational domain was a greater priority for boys than for girls. Girls reported more constrained views of their futures than did boys. Students reported global fears in the domain of personal well-being, and limited specificity within occupational and educational domains. The combination of limited specificity and global fears might result in an imbalance between hoped-for and feared selves. The imbalance might have negative repercussions for students’ future academic motivation and highlights the possible need for further research and possible educational reform.

The association between children’s perceptions of boundary ambiguity and their personal adjustment was examined in a sample of 262 children who lived with their biological parents and 87 children who lived with their single, divorced mothers or their divorced mothers and stepfathers. Adjustment was assessed by measuring mother and teacher reports of child problem behaviors and academic performance. The specific component of boundaries examined was fathers’ psychological and physical presence in the family. The results did not support the hypothesis that an incongruence between children’s perceptions of fathers’ psychological and physical presence would be associated with greater adjustment problems in preadolescents and early adolescents. In addition to testing hypotheses deduced from the boundary ambiguity literature, the independent roles of children’s perceptions of fathers’ psychological presence and family composition were examined to test competing hypotheses. The family structure perspective received the most support.

In response to the lack of research on father/daughter relationships in ethnic minority, low-income families, a qualitative, exploratory study was conducted with 20 early adolescent girls to examine their perceptions of relationships with their fathers. The girls predominantly were Latina or African American and came from low-income, two-parent or single-parent households. They participated in one-to-one, semistructured interviews in which they were asked about their relationships with their fathers. The analysis of the interviews revealed four themes: (a) girls had, or expected to have, activity-oriented relationships with their fathers that involved conversations focused on school, sports, or “the world”; (b) girls wanted “more” from their fathers; (c) girls perceived their fathers as “overprotective”; and (d) girls protected their fathers. With the exception of the fourth theme, each theme was detected in more than three-fourths of the girls’ interviews. The findings indicated a need to examine further the standards by which daughters and fathers evaluate their relationships.

The effects of service-learning on social responsibility and academic success were investigated among a large, racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of students in Grades 6 through 8 in three middle schools. Over the school year, service-learning students maintained their concern for others’ social welfare, whereas control students declined on those concerns. Service-learning students, especially girls, also declined significantly less than did controls in their frequency of talking with parents about school. Compared with other students, students with substantial hours of service-learning, a lot of reflection, and a high degree of motivation attributed to service-learning, significantly increased their belief in the efficacy of their helping behaviors, maintained their pursuit of better grades and their perception that school provided personal development opportunities, and decreased less in their commitment to classwork. The results indicate that service-learning can positively affect students’ social responsibility and academic success.