In this study, we aimed to expand the domain specificity of grit by exploring it in the realm of parenting. Parental grit was defined as parents' inclination to demonstrate perseverance, sustained passion, and adaptability in pursuing long-term parenting goals. With longitudinal data from 1,373 U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchools are critical organisational settings, and school principals face extreme stress levels. However, there are few large-scale, longitudinal studies of demands and resources that drive principals' health and well-being. Using the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework, we evaluated longitudinal reciprocal effects over 3 years relating to job demands, job resources (resilience), job-related outcomes (burnout and job satisfaction), and personal outcomes (happiness and physical health) for a nationally representative sample of 3683 Australian school principals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeer victimization at school is a worldwide problem with profound implications for victims, bullies, and whole-school communities. Yet the 50-year quest to solve the problem has produced mostly disappointing results. A critical examination of current research reveals both pivotal limitations and potential solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals' subjective well-being (SWB) is an important marker of development and social progress. As psychological health issues often begin during adolescence, understanding the factors that enhance SWB among is critical to devising preventive interventions. However, little is known about how institutional contexts contribute to adolescent SWB.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMastery-approach (MAP) goals, focusing on developing competence and acquiring task mastery, are posited to be the most optimal, beneficial type of achievement goal for academic and life outcomes. Although there is meta-analytic evidence supporting this finding, such evidence does not allow us to conclude that the extant MAP goal findings generalize across cultures. Meta-analyses have often suffered from overrepresentation of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples; reliance on bivariate correlations; and lack the ability to directly control individual-level background variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor results from large-scale surveys to inform policy and practice appropriately, all participants must interpret and respond to items similarly. While organizers of surveys assessing student outcomes often ensure this for achievement measures, doing so for psychological questionnaires is also critical. We demonstrate this by examining the dimensionality of reading self-concept-a crucial psychological construct for several outcomes-across reading achievement levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHelping students adjust to university life is a critical developmental issue. Using longitudinal data from 1652 German late adolescents, this research tested the effect of initial high-school parent, same-sex, and opposite sex self-concept and its change on university dropout intentions, study stress, and study satisfaction. High-school self-concept predicted all outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The physical and psychosocial benefits of physical activity for typically developing youth are well established; however, its impact on youth with intellectual disabilities is not as well understood. The aims of this review and meta-analysis were to synthesize the literature and quantify the effects of physical activity on the physical and psychosocial health of youth with intellectual disabilities.
Method: Studies meeting the inclusion criteria were grouped by their focus on physical health and/or psychosocial health outcomes.
CFAs of multidimensional constructs often fail to meet standards of good measurement (e.g., goodness-of-fit, measurement invariance, and well-differentiated factors).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchool principals world-wide report high levels of strain and attrition resulting in a shortage of qualified principals. It is thus crucial to identify psychosocial risk factors that reflect principals' occupational wellbeing. For this purpose, we used the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ-II), a widely used self-report measure covering multiple psychosocial factors identified by leading occupational stress theories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOur newly proposed integrated academic self-concept model integrates 3 major theories of academic self-concept formation and developmental perspectives into a unified conceptual and methodological framework. Relations among math self-concept (MSC), school grades, test scores, and school-level contextual effects over 6 years, from the end of primary school through the first 5 years of secondary school (a representative sample of 3,370 German students, 42 secondary schools, 50% male, M age at grade 5 = 11.75) support the (1) internal/external frame of reference model: Math school grades had positive effects on MSC, but the effects of German grades were negative; (2) reciprocal effects (longitudinal panel) model: MSC was predictive of and predicted by math test scores and school grades; (3) big-fish-little-pond effect: The effects on MSC were negative for school-average achievement based on 4 indicators (primary school grades in math and German, school-track prior to the start of secondary school, math test scores in the first year of secondary school).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe job demands-resources model (JD-R model; Bakker & Demerouti, 2014) is well established in occupational research, and the proposed processes it posits have been replicated numerous times. Thus, the JD-R model provides an excellent framework for explaining the occupational well-being of beginning teachers-an occupation associated with particularly high levels of strain and consequently, high attrition rates. However, the model's assumptions have to date mostly been tested piecewise, and seldom on the basis of longitudinal models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScalar invariance is an unachievable ideal that in practice can only be approximated; often using potentially questionable approaches such as partial invariance based on a stepwise selection of parameter estimates with large modification indices. Study 1 demonstrates an extension of the power and flexibility of the alignment approach for comparing latent factor means in large-scale studies (30 OECD countries, 8 factors, 44 items, N = 249,840), for which scalar invariance is typically not supported in the traditional confirmatory factor analysis approach to measurement invariance (CFA-MI). Importantly, we introduce an alignment-within-CFA (AwC) approach, transforming alignment from a largely exploratory tool into a confirmatory tool, and enabling analyses that previously have not been possible with alignment (testing the invariance of uniquenesses and factor variances/covariances; multiple-group MIMIC models; contrasts on latent means) and structural equation models more generally.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe temporal ordering of depression, aggression, and victimization has important implications for theory, policy, and practice. For a representative sample of high school students (Grades 7-10; N = 3,793) who completed the same psychometrically strong, multiitem scales 6 times over a 2-year period, there were reciprocal effects between relational-aggression and relational-victimization factors: aggression led to subsequent victimization and victimization led to subsequent aggression. After controlling for prior depression, aggression, and victimization, depression had a positive effect on subsequent victimization, but victimization had no effect on subsequent depression.
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