Abstract
In order to use attendance monitoring within an integrative strategy for preventing, assessing and addressing cases of youth with school absenteeism, we need to know whether the attendance data collected by schools cover all students with (emerging) school attendance problems (SAPs). The current article addresses this issue by comparing administrative attendance data collected by schools with self-reported attendance data from the same group of students (age 15–16) in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (N = 4344). We seek to answer the following question: does an estimation of unauthorized absenteeism based on attendance data as collected by schools through electronic registration differ from self-reported unauthorized absenteeism and, if so, are the differences between administrative and self-reported unauthorized absenteeism systematic? Our results revealed a weak association between self-reported unauthorized school absenteeism and registered unauthorized school absenteeism. Boys, students in technical and vocational tracks and students who speak a foreign language at home, with a less-educated mother and who receive a school allowance, received more registered unauthorized absences than they reported themselves. In addition, pupils with school refusal and who were often authorized absent from school received more registered unauthorized absences compared to their self-reported unauthorized school absenteeism. In the discussion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.
Highlights
School absenteeism is a serious problem among youth
Self-reported unauthorized school absenteeism Never 1 time 2 times 3 times 4 times 5 times 6 times 7 times 8 times 9 times 10 to 15 times 15 to 20 times >20 times Type of school attendence problem (SAP) Truancy School refusal School withdrawal Has it ever been discovered that you skipped school? Never Once Several times Often Always Self-reported authorized school absenteeism due to family or personal reasons Never Once 2 to 5 times 5 to 10 times >10 times
Regarding the weak association between self-reported unauthorized school absenteeism and registered unauthorized school absenteeism, the rate of registered unauthorized school absenteeism was approximately twice as large compared to the rate of self-reported school absenteeism
Summary
School absenteeism is a serious problem among youth. Youth with school attendance problems (SAPs) report lower academic efficacy, poorer academic performances, more anxiety, more symptoms of depression and less self-esteem (Kearney, 2008; Reid, 2014). School absenteeism is often embedded in a broader pattern of social deviant behavior: youth with attendance problems have an increased risk of stealing, getting involved in vandalism and are more likely to partake in behaviors at the risk of their health (e.g., smoking, substance use; Maynard et al, 2012; Reid, 2014) These specific problems may in turn reinforce long-term SAP and give rise to a vicious circle eventually increasing the risk of early school leaving and later unemployment. Monitoring of students’ attendance is used to ensure fast detection and to enable schools to adopt strategies to intervene when youth have emerging SAPs. More recently, it has been emphasized that in order to maximize early identification of attendance problems, schools need to make better use of their data by analyzing their collected attendance data (Reid, 2014; Kearney, 2016; Chu et al, 2019). In order to apply attendance monitoring within an integrative strategy for preventing, assessing and addressing cases of youth with school absenteeism (cf. Kearney, 2016), we need to know whether the attendance data collected by schools covers all students with (emerging) SAPs
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