Sandra D. Simpkins – författare

Explore how the peer relationship and extracurricular organized activities—like sports, the arts, and community-based organizations—influence academic functioning, social development, and problem behavior. This volume shows how out-of-school activity offers an ideal context to study peer processes, and to explore both how and why peers matter for organized activity participation.

Starting with the theoretical and empirical research on peers and organized activities, it goes on to address several questions including:

Does co-participating in an organized activity with your friend improve the quality of the relationship? When do peer relations amplify the benefits of participating and when do they exacerbate negative outcomes? Does participation in organized activities help adolescents manage difficult transition periods?

Finally, the volume concludes with a conceptual framework to guide future research on how organized activity characteristics influence peer processes and how these processes within organized activity contexts influence outcomes for adolescents.

This is the 140th volume in this series. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in child and adolescent development. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts on that topic.

Explore how the peer relationship and extracurricular organized activities—like sports, the arts, and community-based organizations—influence academic functioning, social development, and problem behavior. This volume shows how out-of-school activity offers an ideal context to study peer processes, and to explore both how and why peers matter for organized activity participation.

Starting with the theoretical and empirical research on peers and organized activities, it goes on to address several questions including:

Does co-participating in an organized activity with your friend improve the quality of the relationship? When do peer relations amplify the benefits of participating and when do they exacerbate negative outcomes? Does participation in organized activities help adolescents manage difficult transition periods?

Finally, the volume concludes with a conceptual framework to guide future research on how organized activity characteristics influence peer processes and how these processes within organized activity contexts influence outcomes for adolescents.

This is the 140th volume in this series. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in child and adolescent development. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts on that topic.

Parents believe what they do matters. But, how does it matter? How do parents’ beliefs about their children early on translate into the choices those children make as adolescents? The Eccles' expectancy-value model asserts that parents' beliefs about their children during childhood predict adolescents' achievement-related choices through a sequence of processes that operate in a cumulative, cascading fashion over time. Specifi cally, parents' beliefs predict parents' behaviors that predict their children's motivational beliefs. Those beliefs predict children's subsequent choices. Using data from the Childhood and Beyond Study (92% European American; N 723), we tested these predictions in the activity domains of sports, instrumental music, mathematics, and reading across a 12-year period. In testing these predictions, we looked closely at the idea of reciprocal infl uences and at the role of child gender as a moderator. The cross-lagged models generally supported the bidirectional influences described in Eccles' expectancy-value model. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated that: (a) these relations were stronger in the leisure domains than in the academic domains, (b) these relations did not consistently vary based on youth gender, (c) parents were stronger predictors of their children's beliefs than vice versa, and (d) adolescents' beliefs were stronger predictors of their behaviors than the reverse. The findings presented in this monograph extend our understanding of the complexity of families, developmental processes that unfold over time, and the extent to which these processes are universal across domains and child gender.