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The prediction of adolescent runaway: Psychometric and demographic approaches
Abstract
Adolescent runaway remains a relatively common crisis in the lives of many families. Recent literature indicates that somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million adolescents run away from their homes each year. Unfortunately, a large percentage of these adolescent youth are detoured from a path previously leading toward personal goals and parental hopes to unexpected pregnancy, involvement in thefts, drug peddling, prostitution, and ever increasing alienation from family and society. In an effort to identify some predictors of risk factors for runaway behavior among youth, the hospital records of 220 adolescents who were undergoing inpatient psychiatric hospitalization and whose hospitalization had been precipitated by runaway were compared with 220 adolescents who were also undergoing inpatient psychiatric hospitalization for other reasons and with records of a national sample of youth, in general. Statistically significant differences were found among the groups along several parameters, including the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among the youth, themselves, and members of their families; academic adjustment and achievement problems; special education placement; and exposure to physical and/or sexual abuse. Differences in social/emotional variables and in typical response patterns were found among those adolescents who ran away from home, as manifested by modal MMPI profile and group high point codes; 4/8 and 4/9 codes were found most frequently among adolescent runaways. The effort to develop a specific MMPI runaway prediction subscale resulted in statistically significant differences among groups, but use of the scale yielded such a high rate of false positives that it was not found to be clinically useful for individual predictions. It appears promising for assignment of youth to high- or low-risk groups, although further research will be needed. It is clear that some self report items can be used effectively to discriminate between runaway adolescents and nonrunaways, although the number of items obtained in this investigation did not produce a sufficiently large separation between groups. Self report items could be constructed to indicate pervasive tendencies to seek escape, rather than to initiate active coping in such situations, as manifested through chronic runaway behavior.
Subject Area
Psychological tests|Developmental psychology|Psychotherapy
Recommended Citation
Cahill, Kevin Richard, "The prediction of adolescent runaway: Psychometric and demographic approaches" (1988). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8914069.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8914069