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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.