Families, or rather parents are in a state of¯ux: sometimes they row a lot, they divorce, they go and live together again and they die. This is why more and more children grow up in family forms other than the nuclear families with their biological fathers and mothers. What, in the long run, is the effect of this on the well-being of adolescents and young adults between 12±30? We have examined intact families that function well, mediocre or badly, one-parent families and stepfamilies after a divorce and one-parent families after being widowed. The data derive from the Dutch longitudinal panel study``Utrecht Study of Adolescent Development'' (USAD). The results of 1772 respondents between 12 and 30 years old are presented from the third wave by the end of 1997. Compared to youngsters of well functioning nuclear families, the youngsters of discordant nuclear families show a worse physical and mental health, their parental ®xation is not so strong, they tend to drink more alcohol, smoke more cigarettes and use more soft drugs. Children of divorced families are notable for their relational behaviour: they enter into relations at an early age, usually they are more sexually experienced and they report more relational problems. Children of widowed one-parent families do well. In other family types girls suffer a little more from the burden of life than boys. It appears that the effects are hardly different when the children leave home. #

What are the effects on adolescent well-being of positive and negative experiences in both the vocational and relationship careers of youngsters and their parents? Data from the Dutch national panel study Utrecht Study of Adolescent Development (USAD) were used; this is a study of developmental processes as they occur in the life course of young people during the 1990s. A quarter of the total variance of the variable adolescent wellbeing is found at family level. Individual vocational and relationship factors appear to have significant long-term effects on adolescent well-being. The same holds true for relationship problems in the family, especially for girls. Vocational family factors and parents' personal characteristics are not important as predictors of adolescent well-being.Keywords: adolescents, well-being, positive and negative experiences, individual and family factors, vocational and relationship careers, parents. Do vocational and relationship stressors affect the well-being of youngsters aged between 15 and 24 years? Moreover, what are the effects of significant parental experiences in these domains on their children's well-being? Well-being is a basic characteristic of individuals which takes shape in the family in which children grow up and which is affected by the way in which the parents communicate with their children. In adolescence it is not only parents but also peers who become more and more important as a reference group. Parental social support seems to have a weaker effect especially on the domain of relationships. However, parental social

We elaborated an integrated theoretical model of identity within Nurmi's general framework of adolescent life-planning by combining concepts of Tazelaar's mental incongruity theory and Marcia's identity model. Mental incongruity is what people experience when there is a discrepancy between how they think a situation should be (the standard) and how they experience the actual situation or their own behavior (the cognition). The mental incongruity theory is domain specific which connects well with Marcia's domain specific identity model. We studied the influence of adolescents' standards - how they would like their educational status to be or how they would like their social relations to be - and mental incongruity on the development of identity in the respective domains. By means of Lisrel, we tested hypotheses on a sample of 1230 Dutch adolescents, between the ages of 15 to 24. As expected, a higher standard led to more exploration and commitment and thus to a more developed identity, but also to more mental incongruity. More mental incongruity led in its turn to a less developed identity. Thus, a higher standard directly led to a more mature identity, but caused indirectly - via mental incongruity - a less mature identity. Furthermore, a low relational mental incongruity induced a low educational mental incongruity, and likewise a high relational identity somewhat increased the educational identity. Finally, the expected crisscross effects of the standard in one domain decreasing the mental incongruity in the other domain were found.

This article examines the agreement and accuracy of teachers' judgments of their pupils. The data were collected in a primary school in the Netherlands where four teachers and 87 pupils, ranging from grade 2 to 5 (aged 7 to 10 years), participated in this study. The teachers appeared to make use of the same pupil characteristics and the same scale levels in judging their pupils. These teachers generated pupil characteristics that included sociability, self-confidence, troublesomeness and working attitude, which correspond substantially to the Big Five. However, it was found that teachers are not particularly accurate in judging their pupils. Except for ‘troublesomeness’, there was little correspondence between teachers' ratings of pupils and the behavior of those pupils in the classroom, observed independently by ‘naive’ observers. Clearly, teacher judgments are very important and often play a decisive role in children's school careers. Higher levels of agreement and — in particular — accuracy are therefore needed in teachers' judgments. This study implies that specific elaborations of the central constructs of the critical realistic approach to personality judgment agreement and accuracy can be useful in describing and assessing judgments made by individual teachers.