Transistion into adolescence

de Roberta G. Simmons, Dale A. Blyth, Henry A. Murray Research Center

This longitudinal study evaluates the transition from childhood into early and middle adolescence and how it is affected by the type of school a child attends, onset of puberty, and gender. This study was conducted between 1974 and 1979 and had two major phases. The first phase examined the transistion from late childhood into early adolescence using a 2-year longitudinal design. Students were followed from sixth grade in elementary school into the two types of contrasting seventh grade settings: (1) where the children attended the same school from kindergarten through eighth grade; (2) where the child moved from a kindergarten though sixth grade school onto a junior high school. The second phase of the study, which took place over a second 2-year period (ninth and tenth grade), was designed to study the transition into senior high school and to contrast the effects of a double transition in school environment versus a single change in school environments; that is to contrast students who experienced both a junior and senior high school transition to those who moved directly from elementary school to senior high school. The Murray Research Center currently holds all computer-accessible data, and copies of bland measures used at each data collection.