OBJECTIVE. This article describes how adolescents with sickle cell disease (SCD) perceive their ability to perform everyday tasks required for transition to adult health care and independent living. METHOD. The Adolescent Autonomy Checklist (AAC) was adapted to include skills associated with managing SCD (AAC–SCD) and was administered to adolescents during clinic visits. Participants indicated “can do already” or “needs practice” for 100 activities in 12 categories. RESULTS. Of 122 patients, the percentage of adolescents who needed practice was greatest in living arrangements (38.7%), money management (35.8%), vocational skills (29.6%), and health care skills (25.5%). We found a significant effect of age and of cerebrovascular injury on the percentage of those who reported “needs practice” in multiple categories. We found no effect of gender and limited effect of hemoglobin phenotype on any skill category. CONCLUSION. Findings support the need for educational intervention to improve transition skills in adolescents with SCD.

Emerging adulthood defines transition to employment, higher education, and domestic life. This study describes the development of an assessment of self-reported participation in a range of age-appropriate activities. Item selection was established from literature review, feedback from youth and professionals, the former Adolescent Activity Card Sort (AACS), and the original Activity Card Sort (ACS). Iterative item selection occurred with three separate samples of emerging adults and six professionals. Test-retest reliability was evaluated. The Adolescent and Young Adult Activity Card Sort (AYA-ACS) consists of chores (11 items), leisure (13), social (10), health and fitness (9), work (10), education (8), and parenting (9). Test-retest reliability showed significant moderate to substantial Kappa agreement (.48-.85) for all domains except parenting (κ = .15). This preliminary study describes the development of the AYA-ACS to be used with individuals who encounter challenges when transitioning to young adulthood.

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Over recent decades, scenarios and scenario-based software/system engineering have been actively employed as essential tools to handle intricate problems, validate requirements, and support stakeholders' communication. However, despite the widespread use of scenarios, there have been several challenges for engineers to more willingly utilize scenario-based engineering approaches (i.e., scenario methods) in their projects. First, the term scenario has numerous published definitions, thus lacking in a well-established shared understanding of scenarios and scenario methods. Second, the conceptual basis for engineers developing or employing scenarios is missing. To establish shared understanding and to find common denominators of scenario methods, this study leverages well-defined metamodeling and conceptualization that systematically investigate the concepts under analysis and define core entities and their relations. By conducting a semi-systematic literature review, conceptual variables are collected and conceptualized as a conceptual meta-model. As a result, this study introduces scenario variables (SVs) that represent constructs/semantics of scenario descriptions, according to 4 levels of constructs of a scenario method. To evaluate the comprehensibility and applicability of the defined variables, we analyze five existing scenario methods and their instances in automated driving system (ADS) domains. The results showed that our conceptual model and its constituent scenario variables adequately support the understanding of a scenario method and provide a means for comparative analysis between different scenario methods.

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