Who is absent from school when? An optimal matching analysis of within-year variation in the timing of school absences.

Although school absenteeism trajectories can be studied through various parameters and dimensions, such as the amount of school absenteeism, sequence, and timing, most studies have only focused on changes in the amount of school absenteeism. However, when investigating the nature of school absenteeism, an analysis cannot be restricted to just changes in the amount of school absenteeism. In this article, I show how applying optimal matching on time-stamped half days of missed school (n = 6260) enables researchers, policy makers, and school professionals to uncover socio-temporal regularities in trajectories of non-attendance (i.

Measuring School Absenteeism: Administrative Attendance Data Collected by Schools Differ From Self-Reports in Systematic Ways.

In order to use attendance monitoring within an integrative strategy for preventing, assessing and addressing cases of youth with school absenteeism, we need to know whether the attendance data collected by schools cover all students with (emerging) school attendance problems (SAPs). The current article addresses this issue by comparing administrative attendance data collected by schools with self-reported attendance data from the same group of students (age 15-16) in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium ( = 4344). We seek to answer the following question: does an estimation of unauthorized absenteeism based on attendance data as collected by schools through electronic registration differ from self-reported unauthorized absenteeism and, if so, are the differences between administrative and self-reported unauthorized absenteeism systematic? Our results revealed a weak association between self-reported unauthorized school absenteeism and registered unauthorized school absenteeism.

Gender differences in mental health problems among adolescents and the role of social support: results from the Belgian health interview surveys 2008 and 2013.

Background: To investigate how social support relates to mental health problems for Belgian late adolescents and young adults 15-25 years of age. Additionally, we examine changes in mental health problems between 2008 and 2013 and investigate gender differences.

Methods: Multivariate analysis of variance was used to investigate (1) psychological distress, (2) anxiety and (3) depression among 713 boys and 720 girls taken from two successive waves (2008 and 2013) of a representative sample of the Belgian population (Belgian Health Interview survey).