Teaching staff have been especially vulnerable to experiencing psychopathology and compassion fatigue during COVID-19, given the significant demands they have experienced. Yet, research on risk and resilience factors is scant. We assessed the psychological status of Israeli teaching staff during COVID-19, focusing on psychopathology (depression, anxiety, somatization), compassion fatigue (burnout, secondary traumatic stress), and compassion satisfaction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Youth involvement in violence and delinquency has received widespread attention in the literature. However, little is known about youth involvement in political violence, especially among youth who live in conflict areas. The current study examined the mechanisms that underlie youth involvement in serious physical and political violence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is known to be a risk factor for antisocial and delinquent behaviour, but there is still a lack of information on how features of ADHD relate to offending behaviour among adults not already defined by their offending.
Aims: Our aim was to add to knowledge about relationships between ADHD and antisocial behaviour among adults in the general population by answering the following questions: (A) Does the level of self-reported ADHD features relate to criminal and non-criminal antisocial behaviour? (B) To what extent are self-ratings of ADHD features independent of socio-demographic features previously identified as predictors of antisocial behaviour?
Methods: A sample of adults was originally recruited to study public response to the COVID-19 outbreak through an online panel to be representative of the Israeli population. Among other scales, the 2025 participants completed an ADHD self-report scale, an antisocial behaviour self-report scale and a socio-demographic questionnaire probing for age, gender, urbanity, place of birth, socioeconomic status (education and income), family status (being in a relationship and having children) and religiosity.
Numerous studies have established the link between ADHD and antisocial behavior, one of the most serious functional impairments caused by the disorder. However, research on protective factors that mitigate this link is still lacking. The Salutogenic Model of Health offers the “Sense of Coherence” (SOC), establishing that individuals who see their lives as logical, meaningful, and manageable are more resistant to various risk factors and diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on intersectionality theory, the present study examined the contribution of direct, indirect, and interactive effects of individual, family, peer, and contextual factors on violence against others among female Arab teenagers. The study is based on a sample of 193 at-risk teenagers aged 12-21 ( = 16.5), who completed questionnaires in their out-of-home care settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: ADHD predicts higher levels of antisocial behaviour and distress while religiosity is related to lower levels of both. This raises the hitherto unexplored question of how these variables interact.
Aims: The objective of this study was to explore how religious individuals with ADHD fare in terms of these psychosocial outcomes.
Child Abuse Negl
July 2019
Background: Previous research has extensively used a socio-ecological perspective to find the correlates of youth involvement in violence. However, little is known about the extent to which ecological factors correlated with youth violence are affected by gender, especially in non-Western cultures.
Objective: The role of gender in the association between individual, family, and contextual factors and Arab youth involvement in several types of violence (severe physical, moderate physical, and verbal and indirect violence) was explored using a socio-ecological perspective.
Am J Orthopsychiatry
September 2018
Alcohol use among Muslims has received scant research attention, and little is known about the factors that underlie Arab Muslim adolescents' use of alcohol. The data used in this study is based on a large and representative sample of 2,948 Arab Muslim students from Israel, aged 11-18. The results showed that almost 10% of the adolescents reported using alcohol.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study adopted a social-ecological perspective to exploring perpetration of serious physical violence against others among Arab-Palestinian adolescents. A total of 3178 adolescents (aged 13-18) completed anonymous, structured, self-report questionnaire, which included selected items from several instruments that measured variables relating to the constructs examined in the study. We explored the association of individual characteristics (age, gender, normative beliefs about violence, and perceived ethnic discrimination), familial characteristics (parent-adolescent communication and socioeconomic status), and contextual characteristics (exposure to community violence in the neighborhood) with perpetration of serious physical violence against others.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study adopts a social-ecological/contextual perspective to explore Arab youth involvement in cyberbullying perpetration. We explored the association between individual (age, gender, and impulsivity), family (socioeconomic status and parental monitoring), and community (experiencing neighborhood violence) characteristics and cyberbullying perpetration. A moderation model exploring individual, family, and context interactions was tested.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA growing body of research has shown the positive contribution of grandparents to adolescents' well-being. However, studies often overlook the cultural context in which this relationship is embedded. The current study examined whether emotional closeness to the grandparent identified by the adolescents as their closest grandparent varied among Arab and Jewish adolescents and whether cultural affiliation serves as a moderator in the association between emotional closeness to grandparents and adolescent adjustment difficulties and prosocial behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Orthopsychiatry
June 2017
This study examines the involvement in violent behavior of at-risk Arab and Jewish male youth from a large city in Israel. It explores the role masculine and family honor plays in predicting youth involvement in violence and tests whether this association is moderated by ethnic-cultural affiliation. A total of 282 males (59.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examines the involvement of Arab youth at risk from East Jerusalem in delinquent behaviors, such as crimes against a person, public disorder offenses, and political violence. The contribution of religiosity and parental control factors in explaining these different types of youth involvement in illegal behaviors is assessed. A total of 161 young males, aged 15-21, participated in the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVerbal and indirect violence among peers in residential care settings (RCSs) are understudied social problems. This study, based on a sample of 1,324 Jewish and Arab adolescents aged 11-19 in 32 RCSs, examines the prevalence and multilevel correlates of verbal (such as cursing) and indirect (such as social exclusion) forms of victimization by peers in RCSs. Adolescents completed a self-report anonymous questionnaire in their facility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study, guided by the Family Systems Theory, examines the direct effect of maternal use of corporal punishment on children's adjustment difficulties. Also, it explores whether corporal punishment serves as a mediating factor in the relationship between several maternal characteristics, marital relationships, and children's adjustment difficulties. A total of 2,447 Arab mothers completed anonymous, structured, self-report questionnaires.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhysical victimization by peers was examined among 1,324 Jewish and Arab adolescents, aged 11 to 19, residing in 32 residential care settings (RCS) for children at-risk in Israel. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was used to examine the relationships between physical victimization and adolescents' characteristics (age, gender, self-efficacy, adjustment difficulties, maltreatment by staff, and perceived social climate) as well as institution-level characteristics (care setting type, size, structure, and ethnic affiliation). For this study, we define physical violence as being grabbed, shoved, kicked, punched, hit with a hand, or hit with an object.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study uses an ecological/contextual theory to explore how students' perpetration of violence and other aggressive behaviors is associated with individual factors such as gender, age, and perception of school climate, and contextual factors such as cultural affiliation, school climate, and teacher characteristics among 4th- through 6th-grade Jewish and Arab students in Israel. A questionnaire testing the use of aggressive behavior in school was completed by 120 homeroom teachers and 3,375 students. The results of the study show that levels of perpetration of violence and other aggressive behaviors vary between classes (15.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: This study examined individual and contextual factors that explain students' victimization by peers among 4th- through 6th-grade Jewish and Arab students.
Method: A total of 120 homeroom teachers and 3,375 students from 47 schools participated. The study explored how students' reports of violence are influenced by individual factors (gender, age, perception of school climate, victimization by teachers, and fear) teacher-class factors (school climate, homeroom teachers' characteristics such as self-efficacy, and education) and cultural affiliation as a school level factor.
Child Abuse Negl
December 2009
Objectives: The current study presents the prevalence of students' reports of physical and emotional maltreatment by school staff and examines the differences between these reports according to the students' category of involvement in school bullying (only bullies, only victims, bully-victims, and neither bullies nor victims).
Method: This study is based on a large, nationally representative sample of 16,604 students in grades 7-11 in 324 schools across Israel, who completed questionnaires during class. Using Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVA), the study explores the differences between bully-victim group memberships on their reports of staff maltreatment.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study tested the hypothesis that values, abstract goals serving as guiding life principles, become relatively important predictors of adolescents' self-reported violent behavior in school environments in which violence is relatively common. The study employed a students-nested-in-schools design. Arab and Jewish adolescents (N = 907, M age = 16.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current study presents the prevalence of students' reports of perpetration of violence toward peers and teachers among 16,604 7th- through 11th-grade Jewish and Arab students in Israel and examines the individual and school contextual factors that explain students' violence. The study explores how students' reports of violence are influenced by individual factors (gender, age, perception of school climate and intervention) and school contextual factors (cultural affiliation, SES of students' families, school and class size, school climate, intervention). Almost one third of all students reported at least one form of perpetration toward peers, and one in five reported perpetration against teachers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this study, we examined and compared findings from four nationally representative studies of victimization of students by school staff in Israel. We explored whether levels of student victimization by school staff (teachers, principals, secretaries, janitors, etc.) have changed between 1998, 1999, 2002, and 2005, and whether patterns of group differences (gender, age, and cultural groups) were replicated across those four points in time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study employed an ecological perspective to examine the relative predictive power of individual and school contextual factors on weapon carrying at school. The study is based on a nationally representative sample of 10,400 students in Grades 7 through 11 in 162 schools across Israel. Hierarchical logistic modeling examined the relationships between students and school-level variables and carrying weapons to school (guns, knives, and other weapons).
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