School attendance problems negatively affect students’ development. This study attempted to identify different school refusal behavior profiles and to examine their relationship with three dimensions of social anxiety (fear of negative evaluation, social avoidance and distress in new situations, and social avoidance and distress that is experienced more generally in the company of peers) and the perception of family functioning. Participants included 1842 Spanish adolescents (53% girls) aged 15–18 years (M = 16.43; SD = 1.05). The School Refusal Assessment Scale—Revised (SRAS-R), the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A), and the Family APGAR Scale (APGAR: Adaptation, Partnership, Growth, Affection, and Resolve) were administered. Latent class analysis revealed four school refusal behavior profiles: non-school refusal behavior, high school refusal behavior, moderately low school refusal behavior, and moderately high school refusal behavior. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) indicated that adolescents’ with the profile of high school refusal behavior showed higher scores in all the subscales of social anxiety. In contrast, the non-school refusal behavior group revealed higher scores in the perception of good family functioning, whereas the high school refusal behavior profile obtained the lowest scores in this scale. These findings suggest that students who reject school are at a higher risk of developing social anxiety problems and manifesting family conflicts. These students should be prioritized in order to attend to their needs, promoting self-help to overcome social anxiety and family problems with the purpose of preventing school refusal behaviors.

This research aimed to examine the relation between child anxiety and causal attributions in mathematics using a person-centered approach. The Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised and the Sydney Attribution Scale were administered to 1287 Spanish students aged 8 to 11 (M = 9.68, SD = 1.20); 49.4% were girls. Four child anxiety profiles were obtained by the latent class analysis technique: Low Anxiety, Moderate Anxiety, High Anxiety, and Low Anxiety School-type. The four anxious groups significantly differed in all attributions of failure and in attributions of success to ability and effort, with effect sizes ranging from small to large (d = 0.24 to 0.99). The group with the highest anxiety levels attributed its failures more to the lack of ability and effort, and less to external causes. This group attributed its successes less to ability and effort. However, the Low Anxiety School-type group attributed its failures more to external causes and its successes more to ability and effort. The practical implications of these findings suggest that applying cognitive-behavioral programs for anxiety with a component of attribution retraining could be useful to improve both anxiety levels and the maladaptive attributional pattern of each child anxiety profile.

No abstract

Not all adolescents with school attendance problems attribute their behavior to the same causes. Knowing the subtypes of students who reject school and their relationship with new variables, such as self-concept, is an unresolved task. This study aimed to identify different school refusal behavior profiles and to determine whether these profiles differed from each other based on the scores of the eleven dimensions of self-concept (Physical appearance, Physical abilities, Parent relations, Same-sex relations, Opposite-sex relations, Honesty, Emotional stability, Self-esteem, Verbal, Math, and General school). The participants were 1315 Spanish students (57.6% male) aged 12–18 years (M = 15.21; SD = 1.74). The School Refusal Assessment Scale-Revised and the Self-Description Questionnaire II-Short Form were administered. A latent class analysis revealed four school refusal behavior profiles: Moderately High School Refusal Behavior, Moderately Low School Refusal Behavior, Mixed School Refusal Behavior and Non-School Refusal Behavior. The results indicated that the Mixed School Refusal Behavior group was the most maladaptive profile and revealed the lowest mean scores on self-concept. In contrast, Non-School Refusal and Moderately Low School Refusal Behavior groups revealed the highest scores in all dimensions of self-concept. Implications for working toward the prevention of school refusal in students with low self-concept are discussed.

r e s u M e n Se analizó la capacidad predictiva de la autoeficacia académica percibida sobre las altas autoatribuciones académicas en una muestra de 874 estudiantes adolescentes chilenos. Se administraron la Escala de Autoeficacia Percibida Específica de Situaciones Académicas y la Escala de Atribución de Sídney. Los análisis de regresión logística revelaron que la autoeficacia académica fue un predictor estadísticamente significativo de las autoatribuciones a la capacidad y al esfuerzo, independientemente del área de conocimiento. Esta relación de predicción fue positiva en situaciones de éxito y negativa ante situaciones de fracaso. La autoeficacia predijo significativamente las autoatribuciones a causas externas en situaciones de éxito académico, en el área de lenguaje y en la suma de las puntuaciones tanto de lenguaje como de matemáticas.Palabras clave autoeficacia académica; autoatribuciones académicas; regresión logística; adolescentes; éxito académico; fracaso académico a b s t r a c t It was analyzed the predictive ability of perceived academic self-efficacy on high academic self-attributions in a sample of 874 adolescents Chilean students. The Escala de Autoeficacia Percibida Específica de Situaciones Académicas (EAPESA) and the Spanish version of Sydney Attribution Scale (SAS) were administrated. Logistic regression analyses revealed that perceived academic self-efficacy was a statistically significant predictor of selfattributions to ability and effort, regardless of the area of knowledge. This predictive relationship was positive in successful situations, and it was negative in failure situations. Academic self-efficacy only significantly predicted self-attributions to external causes in academic success situations in the language area and the total of the scores both language and mathematics.