Are School Phobic Adolescents Overdependent?

Abstract

In this study, 42 school phobic youngsters aged 11 to 15 were investigated to find out if they were exceptionally dependent, particularly on their mothers, as had repeatedly been asserted in connection with similar cases, often without adequate supporting evidence of an objective nature (Berg, 1970). TheHighlands Dependency Questionnaire(H.D.Q.) was administered to their mothers around the time they were accepted for admission to an adolescent psychiatric in-patient unit. The Questionnaire had previously been found to measure at least two unrelated sorts of dependency, represented by a sociability factor (I) and an immaturity factor (III) with satisfactory reliability and validity; this emerged when a principal component factor analysis was performed on the results of applying it to the mothers of a randomly selected sample of 68 secondary school children from the general population, stratified for age, sex and social class (Berget al., 1971). Data on 14 variables was processed on the University of Leeds English Electric KDF9 computer, using a system of standard programmes (Hamiltonet al., 1965). In addition to the two setsof factorscores which were calculated using actual raw score weights, two corresponding sets ofsubscalescores were calculated using approximate raw score weights; correlations between factor and subscale scores in the control group had been found to be: r = ·87 for sociability and r = ·84 for immaturity (Berget al., 1971), whereas in 19 youngsters out of the school phobic group, looked at in another context, they were: r = ·51 for sociability (perhaps explained by a divergence between at least two tendencies which have different emphasis in the factor and subscale scores) and r = ·95 for immaturity. The criteria adopted for the diagnosis of school phobia had been given previously when 29 school phobic cases with similar clinical features were reported in some detail (Berget al., 1969).