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No description available.

Three groups of adolescent girls ages 15-18 were compared regarding recent life stresses. Group I consisted of 50 girls pregnant for the first time. Group II consisted of 50 girls who never had been pregnant but were sexually experienced (defined as having engaged in sexual intercourse). Group III consisted of 50 girls who never engaged in sexual intercourse. All three groups were asked nine questions of demographic information and were administered the Recent Life Events Questionnaire. Subjects were asked to rate from 1-5 each event that had happened to them: for Group III the year before testing, for Group II the year before first engaging in sexual intercourse, and for Group I (who took the RLEQ twice) both the year before first intercourse and the year before first pregnancy. Results suggested that rating of events did not discriminate between groups, but the number of actual events that had occurred in their lives did. Significant differences also were noted among the three groups regarding adopted versus nonadopted status and the combined abuse index (index reflecting numbers of subjects who had been victims of either child abuse or sexual abuse at home). More girls in the pregnant group reported being adopted and being victims of abuse than would be expected in the general population. The study suggests a profile of girls at risk for adolescent pregnancy from stresses in their lives and without regard to their sexual behavior.

Narrative analysis, a form of narrative inquiry, uses stories to frame and describe how people interpret and construct the meanings of their lives. Stories connect us with our past, help us to understand our present, and offer vision of possible futures. People live and create their lives through the stories they see, hear, tell, internalize, and hope for. The interpretation of narrative is not about certainties or standards, but rather about the multiplicity of perspectives and possibilities that can be constructed to make experience understandable. Critical interpretation of narrative can thus be a transformative process; a process being so crucial to the health of adolescent girls in Western culture. This study explores how four adolescent girls, and one researcher, together, interpreted and constructed the meanings of their bodies. The journey connects the researcher's struggle to find more democratic and empowering forms of inquiry, with the stories four eighth grade girls, diverse in race, social class, religion, and skin color, tell about how they experience and see their bodies in culture, in relation to others, and as them selves. All four girls are learning to create and desire an "image" of an ideal woman, and thus are beginning to objectify their bodies to be "looked at" by others. Image was a predominant interpretive frame for constructing meaning of the body for all four girls. Yet race, particularly visual racial representations, was also a predominant interpretive frame for the two African American, and one African American-Indian girls. / Ph. D.

This study was designed to examine the relationship of adolescent females' career choices to locus of control, perceptions of femininity, socioeconomic status, race, mother's occupation and developmental stage, The participants in this study were 230 eighth grade girls and 130 twelfth grade girls from a densely populated, urban-suburban area which was predominantly white middle class. Four instruments were used to collect data. These included the Career Choice Form, designed by the researcher to gather information about participants' career choices, and the Personal Data Questionnaire, developed for collecting information about socioeconomic status, race, mother's occupation and developmental stage. Rotter's Internal-External Scale and Spence and Helmreich's Attitudes toward Women Scale were used respectively to obtain measures of locus of control and perceptions of femininity. Data was collected in May, 1980, Students met with the researcher in large groups and completed all four instruments during one-hour periods. In this study career choices were described as traditional (30 percent or more of all employed workers in a particular occupation are female) or nontraditional (less than 30 percent of all employed workers in a particular occupation are female). The frequency and percentage of traditional and nontraditional career choices found among students in various subpopulations (i.e., 8th graders; 12th graders; whites; minorities; high, medium and low SES groups; respondents with mothers in traditional careers and respondents with mothers in nontraditional careers) were reported. Mean scores on the I-E Scale and the Attitudes toward Women Scale were also computed for traditional and nontraditional career choosers. Multiple regression procedures were used to analyze the data: respondents' career choice was the dependent variable and the independent variables included students' I-E score, AWS score, socioeconomic status classification (high, medium or low), race (white or minority), mother's occupation and grade level (measure for developmental stage). Multiple regression procedures were chosen for analyzing the data as this provided a method for studying the relationship of career choices to each of the independent variables while controlling for the effects of the other independent variables. The data collected in this study revealed that nontraditional career choices increased as socioeconomic status increased. Nontraditional career choices were also more prevalent among 12th graders than among 8th graders. Results of the multiple regression analysis indicated that a significant relationship existed between adolescent females' career choice and socioeconomic status and developmental stage. Locus of control, perceptions of femininity, race and mother's occupation were not found to be significantly related to adolescent females' career choices. / Ed. D.

M.S.

The purpose of this study was to compile a table of the reported magnesium contents of 100 gram portions of commonly used foods and to calculate the magnesium content in the certain experimental diets given to 12 preadolescent girls during 53 days in the summer of 1958, The subjects were six and one-half to nine years of age. Each subject was of normal math and weight for their height and age. The diets were adequate in all nutrients as recommended by the National Research Council (34) except for the nitrogen intake which averaged 3.46 grams daily for five six-day periods, and 2.83 grams for the following three six-day periods. / Master of Science

The problem of this thesis is three-fold: (1) to determine what social workers, officers of the law, and leaders in the field of education believe about juvenile delinquency; (2) to study the backgrounds, personalities, and criminal records of one hundred girls committed to the Texas State Training School at Gainesville, Texas, to determine the major factors in their delinquency; and (3) to make recommendations that may be helpful in meeting the problems of youth.

This thesis presents a comparative study of retention of learning by boys and girls of Stonewall Jackson School of Denton, Texas.