Abstract
Truancy continues to be a major problem, affecting most school districts in the U.S. Truancy is related to school dropout, with associated adverse consequences, including unemployment and delinquency. It is important to obtain a more complete picture of truants' educational experience. First, the present study sought to examine the longitudinal growth (increasing/decreasing trend) in truant youths' attitudes toward school and misbehavior in school (disobedience, inappropriate behavior, skipping school). Second, this study focused on examining the impact of a Brief Intervention (BI) targeting the youths' substance use, as well as socio-demographic and background covariates, on their attitudes toward school and school behavior problems over time. A linear growth model was found to fit the attitudes toward school longitudinal data, suggesting the youths' attitudes toward school are related across time. An auto-regressive lag model was estimated for each of the school misbehaviors, indicating that, once initiated, youth continued to engage in them. Several socio-demographic covariates effects were found on the youths' attitudes towards school and school misbehaviors over time. However, no significant, overall BI effects were uncovered. Some statistically significant intervention effects were found at specific follow-up points for some school misbehaviors, but none were significant when applying the Holm procedure taking account of the number of follow-ups. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Highlights
1.1 Introduction to the ProblemTruancy continues to be a major problem in affecting most school districts in the U.S Generally, truancy is defined as unauthorized, intentional absence from compulsory schooling
Eligible participants were recruited from a community diversion program and referrals from any Hillsborough County School District (HCSD) social worker or guidance counselor who knew of eligible youth
The growth model analyses were completed using Mplus Version 7.11 (Muthèn & Muthèn, 1998-2012), a versatile, multivariate statistical modeling program that estimates a variety of models for continuous and categorical observed and latent variables
Summary
1.1 Introduction to the ProblemTruancy continues to be a major problem in affecting most school districts in the U.S Generally, truancy is defined as unauthorized, intentional absence from compulsory schooling. Recent statistics on truancy in Los Angeles County indicate high rates of unexcused absences, with the highest rates being found in urban high schools (Dropout Nation, 2010). Two hundred thousand Los Angeles County students were truant during the 2008-2009 school year, which represented 16 percent of all students attending schools in the county. Colorado truancy data for 2010 to 2011 (Colorado Department of Education, 2011) indicated truancy rates (total student days unexcused absent/total days of possible attendance for all students) above ten percent for many schools, including several Denver area schools. A number of socio-demographic covariates were used in our study: (1) age (in number of years); (2) gender (0 = male, 1 = female); (3) race (1 = African American, 0 = other); and (4) ethnicity (1 = Hispanic, 0 = other). Most of the youth were male; they averaged 14.8 years in age at entry into the study; and they were ethnically diverse
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