Effects of Classroom Composition on the Development of Antisocial Behavior in Lower Secondary School

Early adolescence is a critical period during which classroom composition may affect behavioral development. This study investigated whether classmates’ levels of aggression and delinquency influenced individual antisocial behavior during the first year of secondary school. At this point, students had just transitioned to a new classroom peer environment. A short‐term longitudinal design with four measurement points distributed across the school year was applied. Data were collected from the anonymous self‐reports of 825 seventh graders. Longitudinal negative binomial multilevel analyses revealed that classmates’ antisocial behavior influenced pupils’ behavioral development (other peer influences were controlled). Furthermore, classroom behavioral heterogeneity moderated the peer effect regarding delinquency but not aggression.     

Class origin and young adults’ re-enrollment

This paper examines re-enrollment decisions taken by adults who have previously participated in the labor market in the US. We investigate the influence of social origin on re-enrollment and test hypotheses based on the “status reproduction” argument. We find that young adults from the lower classes re-enroll less often than those from the upper classes and that these differences can be attributed to a large extend to different ability or performance. Beyond the effects of social origin as such, we also scrutinize the effects of the child's class position relative to family status as a more direct implication of the “status reproduction” argument. Our analyses reveal that once young adults from higher status positions have reached their parents’ class, re-enrollment is somewhat less likely to occur. However, this effect of the child's relative class to the parents’ is rather weak.     

Self-touching and attentional processes: The role of task difficulty,selection stage,and sex differences

Lateral and bilateral self-touching movements were studied in a group of men and women performing a series of attentional tasks. In all tasks, subjects were instructed to selectively attend to, and shadow (i.e., repeat outloud), one of two passages that were presented simultaneously through earphones. Loudness, voice quality, or thematic content determined which passage had to be selected and shadowed. Performance was significantly better when shadowing on the basis of loudness or voice quality (an earlier, easier selection) than when following content (a more difficult selection that occurs at a later stage in the information processing continuum). However, self-touching rates during performance were not simply a function of task difficulty but seemed to depend on the processing stage at which selection occurred as well as on the type of selection involved. Strong, significant associations emerged between lateral self-touching and performance measures in most of the tasks for the women but in only one task for the men. The sample size on which these correlations are based is small and, hence, these findings must be interpreted with caution. However, in the light of previous findings on sex differences with these tasks, the present results suggest that lateral movements may serve different functions in men and women.We are grateful to Dr. Norbert Freedman, Director of the Unit at which this work was carried out, for his encouragement and support during all phases of this project, and to Dr. Marshall Bush for generously making available to us his selective listening tasks. Some findings reported in this paper were included in the second author's master's thesis at New York University, Department of Psychology.     

Book reviews

Franco Ferrarotti The Myth of Inevitable Progress, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp.VIII,208.

Peter Grootings, Bjorn Gustavsen, and Lajos Héthy (eds.) New Forms of Work Organization and Their Social and Economic Development, Budapest, Statistical Publishing House, 1986, pp. VIII, 297.

Janusz Lewandowski and Jan Szomberg Samorzad w dobie “Solidarnosci”. Wspolpraca samorzadow pracowniczych Pomorza Gdanskiego na tle sytuacji w kraju w latach 1980/81 (Self‐government in the time of Solidarity. Cooperation of the self‐governmental bodies in the Baltic region and its general background during the period 1980/81), London, Odnowa, 1985, pp. 109.