Original articleTeacher connectedness and health-related outcomes among detained adolescents
Section snippets
Participants
Administrators and educators from 8 regional youth detention centers (RYDCs) located in Georgia were solicited for their cooperation in a cross-sectional survey of female and male adolescent detainees. These 8 centers were selected because they had a male-female ratio no greater then 3:1, which ensured an adequate number of female adolescents from which to sample. Adolescents were eligible if they were 14 to 18 years old, had been enrolled in school prior to being detained, had been detained at
Results
The overall study sample comprised 550 adolescents. Descriptive statistics of the overall sample are illustrated in Table 1. Of the total sample, half were female adolescents (50.1%), and 41% were identified as white and non-Hispanic and 39.6% as African-American. The average age of these adolescents was 15.4 years (SD = .96), and the median level of education was completion of the ninth grade. A fourth of these adolescents (25.6%) lived with both parents, while almost half (45.1%) lived with
Discussion
This is one of the first studies to empirically document that low teacher connectedness is associated with drug and sexual risk behaviors among detained youth. The strong findings may in part be explained by social support perspectives [22], [23]. Perception of teacher connectedness could be conceptualized as 1 dimension of social support. Numerous studies have documented that adolescents who feel connected to a caring adult [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29] or a supportive school environment
Conclusion
Although schools represent an important venue for implementing primary prevention programs, they are also a place where meaningful social relationships are forged. Many of these social relationships, as in positive teacher-adolescent relationships, provide adolescents with socially protective moorings in communities where risk behaviors are often perceived as normative, and community and peer influences may be counterproductive to adopting health-protective behaviors.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by the Emory Center for AIDS Research (NIH/NIAID 2 P30 AI50409-04A1), the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention at Indiana University, and a grant from the University Research Council at Emory University. D. Voisin, R. DiClemente, and L. Salazar contributed to the design, analysis, and interpretation of the data. R. DiClemente, L. Salazar, R. Crosby, W. Yarber, and Michelle Staples-Horne contributed to the conception and acquisition of that data. All authors
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