Adaptation and Validation of the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule for Use With High School Dropouts

Measuring Stressors Among Adolescents: Validation of the Positive and Negative Adolescent Life Experiences Scale

This article develops and validates the Positive and Negative Adolescent Life Experiences (PANALE) scale, a 11-item tool that enables researchers to measure adolescent stressors in a more valid and efficient manner than existing adolescent stressors scales. The PANALE presents good psychometric qualities, in terms of construct validity (factorial structure, measurement invariance, and composite reliability) and concurrent validity with regard to eustress and distress symptoms in a French sample of high school adolescents ( N = 1513). Overall, the PANALE provides a viable alternative to existing methods for conducting quantitative research on adolescent stress processes, notably those related to school disengagement and dropout processes.

Video-Based Stress Detection through Deep Learning

Stress has become an increasingly serious problem in the current society, threatening mankind’s well-beings. With the ubiquitous deployment of video cameras in surroundings, detecting stress based on the contact-free camera sensors becomes a cost-effective and mass-reaching way without interference of artificial traits and factors. In this study, we leverage users’ facial expressions and action motions in the video and present a two-leveled stress detection network (TSDNet). TSDNet firstly learns face- and action-level representations separately, and then fuses the results through a stream weighted integrator with local and global attention for stress identification. To evaluate the performance of TSDNet, we constructed a video dataset containing 2092 labeled video clips, and the experimental results on the built dataset show that: (1) TSDNet outperformed the hand-crafted feature engineering approaches with detection accuracy 85.42% and F1-Score 85.28%, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of using deep learning to analyze one’s face and action motions; and (2) considering both facial expressions and action motions could improve detection accuracy and F1-Score of that considering only face or action method by over 7%.

Gender Differences in Adolescents' Exposure to Stressful Life Events and Differential Links to Impaired School Functioning

Gender differences in exposure and reactivity to specific stressful life events (SLE) contribute to explaining adolescent boys' and girls' differential susceptibility to common adjustment difficulties like depression and behavioral problems. However, it is unclear whether these gender differences are also relevant to understanding another key marker of adolescent maladjustment: high school dropout. A state-of-the-art interview protocol was used to assess recent SLE in a sample of academically vulnerable Canadian adolescents (N = 545, 52% boys). The sample was comprised of three groups in approximately equal proportions: 1) students who had recently dropped out; 2) matched students at risk of dropping out but who persevered nevertheless; and 3) "normative" students with an average level of risk. When SLE of all types were considered together, overall exposure was similar for adolescent boys and girls, and the SLE-dropout association did not vary as a function of gender. However, gender differences emerged for specific events. Boys were especially exposed to SLE related to performance (e.g., school failure, suspension) and conflicts with authority figures (e.g., with teachers or the police), whereas girls were particularly exposed to SLE involving relationship problems with family members, peers, or romantic partners. In terms of specific SLE-dropout associations, one consistent result emerged, showing that performance/authority-related SLE were significantly associated with dropout only among boys. It therefore seems that considering gendered exposure and sensitivity to SLE is important for understanding the emergence of educational difficulties with long-ranging consequences for future health and well-being.

School-based extracurricular activity involvement and high school dropout among at-risk students: Consistency matters

Encouraging involvement in school-based extracurricular activities (ECA) may be important for preventing high school dropout. However, the potential of these activities remains underexploited, perhaps because studies linking ECA involvement and dropout are rare and based on decades-old data. Previous studies also ignore key parameters of student involvement. The present study expands and updates this limited literature by using recent data from a high-risk Canadian sample (N = 545) and by considering a range of involvement parameters. Results showed that consistent involvement in the past year was associated with lower odds of dropout (OR = 0.32; 95% CI = 0.17-0.61). However, adolescents who interrupted their involvement during this period (e.g., because of cancelations or exclusions) were as much at risk of dropout as those who were not involved at all. Findings notably imply that excluding students from ECA (e.g., because of No Pass/No Play policies) may heighten their dropout risk.