Parent-Adolescent Vocational Aspiration Congruence and its Relations with Academic Adjustment.

Adolescents' own vocational aspirations and those of parents for their adolescent children play significant roles in adolescents' development. The present study examined how the (in)congruence between adolescents' vocational aspirations and their parents' aspirations for them were associated with adolescents' academic achievement and test anxiety. The study's sample included 662 parent-adolescent pairs (adolescent Mage = 14.09), and the aspiration and adjustment data were collected at intervals 3 years apart. Using polynomial regression analyses and surface graphs, parent-child aspiration congruence was found to be significantly associated with later academic achievement and test anxiety, but incongruence did not show any significant relationship with either outcome. Such patterns were more prominent among boys (n = 306) than girls and among high socioeconomic status (SES) adolescents (n = 324) than among low SES adolescents. The findings suggest that academic adjustment is more predictable when there is parent-child congruence than when there is incongruence in aspirations.

Gender differences on the MMPI across American and Korean adult and adolescent normative samples.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether gender differences on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992) items are comparable across 2 distinctive cultural samples: Americans and Koreans. Using large, representative adult and adolescent samples from both cultures, we found that the American samples were associated with a higher proportion of items with gender differences than the Korean samples. The American adult sample produced gender differences on a higher proportion of items than did the American adolescent sample, but no such age difference was found between the Korean samples. Despite these differences between cultures and between age groups, content dimensions underlying items with gender differences were very similar across cultures and age groups, centering on stereotypical gender interests, behaviors, and emotions.