For the last issue of the year the journal reverts to a mix of papers after the special edition on psycho-educational assessment. The first is a paper on career choice of Australian secondary school students by Natal'ya Galliott, Linda Graham and Naomi Sweller. We really appreciate these papers on careers as so few are submitted to the journal. Hopefully if you find this paper interesting you might consider writing something on this aspect of our work either as a research paper or for the practitioners’ section of the journal.
The next two papers are on the topic of school bullying. The first is by Leanne Lester and David Mander who examine a relatively understudied population of secondary school boarding students and their experiences of bullying. Unfortunately, it was found that there was a spike in the frequency of bullying perpetration immediately after transition to secondary boarding school with an increase continuing to occur through the following two years. The next study by Anna Sevcikova, Hana Machackova, Michelle Wright, Lenka Dedkova and Alena Cerna looked at how cybervictims’ social support seeking was mediated by peer rejection and parental attachment. Students who had poor parental attachment and higher peer rejection showed less seeking for social support.
The following four articles look at different cultures and counselling. In our multi-cultural Australian society and schools this is an increasingly important topic. The first of these papers by Anita Mak and Tami Shaw investigated Australian psychologists’ perceptions of intercultural counselling, comparing them with a proposed model of Culturally Competent Counselling Practice. In Poi Kee Low's study teachers, school counsellors and counsellors working in the community were interviewed about the school counselling service in Singapore. Interestingly there were differences between the groups about the expected levels of confidentiality about information gained in counselling which was a barrier for co-operation between the groups. In addition, each group held different ideas of how to ensure students’ families were appropriately served. Unfortunately, probably a common problem world-wide.
An intervention study to improve first-grade students’ social competence in Hong Kong is reported next by Sylvia Liu, Mantak Yuen and Nirmala Rao. The structured group-games intervention led by trained parent-volunteers showed that there was an improvement in children's social awareness and their social status. The last paper by Gui Chen, Guiping Guo, Jingbo Gong and Shuiyuan Xiao examines Chinese adolescents’ body dissatisfaction and depression. It was found that age and gender did not affect this relationship but the adolescents’ weight moderated the association for boys. Depression was found to be most positively associated with depression for underweight boys but not for overweight boys; while for girls the body dissatisfaction and depression was strong irrespective of their actual weight.
I hope you enjoy reading this edition of the journal and find something useful for your practice in schools. I wish you a joyous festival season.
