Little is known about how adolescents' peer relations might alter whether sport participation is associated with alcohol use. Consistent with social learning theory, we found that sport participation was protective against alcohol use if these peers had low alcohol use, but athletes were likely to use alcohol if their sport friends and…

Although organized activities (OAs) have been established as important contexts of development, limited work has examined the role of OAs across the high school transition in buffering adolescents' social adjustment by providing opportunities for visibility and peer affiliation. The transition to high school is characterized by numerous…

Whereas in years past, young people typically made a discrete transition from school to work, two ideal typical routes now characterize the sharing of school and work roles during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. Longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study show that one route involves less intensive employment during high…

This qualitative study focused on the intersection of personal and ethnic identities among forty African American, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Chinese American high school students. The patterns in content indicated that for the Puerto Ricans, the intersection of their personal and social identities was a series of accommodations to a positive…

Friendships serve as a secure base and buffer that help adolescents to cope with the psychological challenges of the social ecology of high school. Through these relationships, adolescents develop a stronger sense of belonging to their schools.

This study examined why female adolescents choose to opt out of the math pipeline during high school more often than males, which has implications for their long-term careers. (Contains 3 figures.)

For middle and high school girls in high-ability math classes, interest and self-concept made a difference for school grades, and for all adolescents, maternal expectations were influential in predicting math grades over time. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 2 notes.)

This chapter provides a brief retrospective on the general topic and the empirical work presented in this volume, as well as a discussion of the practical implications of these findings for high schools, institutions of higher education, and the current workforce.

This chapter addresses how critical choices in the math and science pipeline can be traced back to adolescents' self-concepts of abilities and values at the beginning of high school. (Contains 3 figures.)

This chapter explores the relationship between childhood aggressive behavior and later adjustment, with a focus on the transition to high school. Pattern-oriented prodigal analysis is used to identify four homogeneous groups, based on stability or change in risk and nonrisk status over time. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The authors' approach to using pattern-centered analyses and longitudinal data addresses how configurations of personal and contextual factors forecast the educational achievement and attainments of different youth across adolescence. Here, they discuss various types of pattern-centered analyses and provide an empirical illustration of how these…