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Adolescence is a time when a young person develops his or her identity, acquires greater autonomy and independence, experiments and takes risks and grows mentally and physically. To successfully navigate these changes, an accessible and health system when needed is essential.

We assessed the structure and content of national primary care services against these standards in the field of adolescent health services. The main criteria identified by adolescents as important for primary care are as follows: accessibility, staff attitude, communication in all its forms, staff competency and skills, confidential and continuous care, age appropriate environment, involvement in health care, equity and respect and a strong link with the community.

We found that although half of the Models of Child Health Appraised countries have adopted adolescent-specific policies or guidelines, many countries do not meet the current standards of quality health care for adolescents. For example, the ability to provide emergency mental health care or respond to life-threatening behaviour is limited. Many countries provide good access to contraception, but specialised care for a pregnant adolescent may be hard to find.

Access needs to be improved for vulnerable adolescents; greater advocacy should be given to adolescent health and the promotion of good health habits. Adolescent health services should be well publicised, and adolescents need to feel empowered to access them.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the situation of accessibility to reproductive health rights, and the conditional factors of accessibility to such rights of adolescents.

A qualitative method was used to extract information from 80 informants. Data were collected through in-depth interview, focus group discussion, observation, data recording, audio recording and the review of related documents during August to October 2016.

Adolescents had not accessed to their right on informing of their decision making; information and education; health; confidentiality and privacy; and treating with equity and no discrimination. Also, the conditional factors influenced to the accessibility on such rights were lacking of knowledge on reproductive health and negative attitude toward this matter among the people concerned. There were still no regulations or policies on the performance of authority agencies and the factors on social dimensions, traditions, customs, sexual culture and religion.

The findings from this study would be a help to promote the accessibility for adolescents to reproductive health rights under the Prevention and Solution of Adolescent Pregnancy Problem Act, B.E. 2559 (2016) specific on standard criteria reproductive health services from hospitals and the involvement from Ministry of Education for the development of sex life skill and reproductive health for the teacher.

Mental health problems make a significant contribution to morbidity and mortality in adolescents worldwide. To address mental health in adolescents policy response should intertwine the life course approach and the ecological model that positions adolescents in the context of multifactorial influences. The purpose of this paper is to describe policy response at four levels: multisector policies and interventions, health systems policies and interventions, evidence-based clinical interventions and actions to monitor progress. It aims to analyse the implications for adolescent mental health of key recent global commitments including the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health.

Multisector policies and interventions on determinants of adolescent mental health and well-being are drawn from the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health. Key health systems actions are derived from the Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan (2013-2020). In both cases, policies and interventions are made specific for provisions relevant to adolescents. Examples of implementation of policies and interventions are drawn from a World Health Organization (WHO) review of national policy documents found in WHO MiNDbank. A list of indicators to monitor progress is being proposed based on Mental Health Atlas and WHO indicators for adolescent health.

With some notable exceptions, the mental health of adolescents is not adequately addressed by national health policies. There is a considerable body of evidence on the effectiveness of policies and interventions, and recent global commitments give new hope for promoting adolescent mental health through a multisectoral response, within which the health sector has an important role to play. Global reporting mechanisms, including the Mental Health Atlas, should be “adolescent-sensitive”, meaning that adolescent specific impact, outcomes, inputs and determinants should be measured, reported and acted upon.

This paper analyses the meaning specific to adolescents in the policies and interventions promoted in the SDGs, the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health and the Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan (2013-2020). For the first time a four-levels policy response specific to adolescent mental health is put together: multisector policies and interventions, health systems policies and interventions, evidence-based clinical interventions and actions to monitor progress.

This study aims to synthesize the existing serious games designed to promote mental health in adolescents with chronic illnesses.

This study conducted a review following the guidelines of Joanna Briggs Institute and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. Searches were conducted in databases PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature, PsycINFO, China national knowledge infrastructure Wanfang, VIP Database for Chinese Technical Periodicals and SinoMed from inception to February 12, 2023.

A total of 14 studies (describing 14 serious games) for improving the mental health of adolescents with chronic diseases were included. Of all the included games, 12 were not described as adopting any theoretical framework or model. The main diseases applicable to serious games are cancer, type 1 diabetes and autism spectrum disorder. For interventional studies, more than half of the study types were feasibility or pilot trials. Furthermore, the dosage of serious games also differs in each experiment. For the game elements, most game elements were in the category “reward and punishment features” (n = 50) and last was “social features” (n = 4).

Adolescence is a critical period in a person’s physical and mental development throughout life. Diagnosed with chronic diseases during this period will cause great trauma to the adolescents and their families. Serious game interventions have been developed and applied to promote the psychological health field of healthy adolescents. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to scope review the serious game of promoting mental health in the population of adolescents with chronically ill. At the same time, the current study also extracted and qualitatively analyzed the elements of the serious game.

Positive psychology helps us understand the knowledge required to contribute to adolescents' societal development and adjustability. Adolescence is the crucial stage to work on for a balanced personality. The present study concerned adolescents' self-strength, happiness, and help-seeking behaviour. The authors aimed to explore the relationship between adolescents' self-strength and happiness and investigate the mediational effect of adolescents' help-seeking behaviour on their self-strength and happiness.

The research design of the current quantitative study was correlational, and 809 adolescents from China and Pakistan participated in the present study. Data were personally collected from participants through self-developed scales.

We deployed Pearson correlation and simple mediation using SPSS software and found a linear, positive, strong (r = 0.654, n = 809, p = 0.000 < 0.01) and statistically significant correlation between adolescents' self-strength and happiness. The authors also found a significant indirect effect of help-seeking on adolescents' self-strength and happiness at (β = 0.373, t(907) = 7.01).

Using self-reported scales to gather information was one of the study's limitations. Adolescents may have misunderstood the notion or construct narrated in words or responded biasedly despite the bilingual scales.

This study offers social and practical implications for educators, parents, and school administrators to address the development of adolescents' personalities using a positive psychology lens.

The findings are of significant importance for teachers working in the elementary schools. They may work on adolescents' self-strength, happiness, and help-seeking to develop balanced personalities.

This study longitudinally investigated the predictors and mediators of adolescent smartphone addiction by examining the impact of parental smartphone addiction at T1 on adolescent smartphone addiction at T3, as well as the separate and sequential role of adolescent self-esteem and depression at T2 as mediating factors.

This study used a hierarchical regression and the PROCESS macro (Model 6) to investigate research model by collecting 3,904 parent-adolescent pairs. Panel data were collected from three waves of the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS).

First, the result showed that parental smartphone addiction at T1 significantly and positively predicted adolescent smartphone addiction at T3. Second, the serial mediation analysis revealed that the impact of parental smartphone addiction at T1 on adolescent smartphone addiction at T3 was mediated by adolescent self-esteem and depression at T2 independently and serially.

The findings enhance our comprehension of the impact of parental smartphone addiction, adolescent self-esteem and depression, on adolescent smartphone addiction.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to understand adolescent literacy instruction and learning in diverse classrooms.

Approach: A historical account of the evolution of adolescent literacy instruction to what it is today is discussed. The authors then ask the questions, “Who are adolescents today?” and use worked examples of illustrate how to optimally reach their instructional needs.

Findings: The authors believe that knowing what’s hot in adolescent literacy is paramount to effective adolescent literacy instruction. Expanding traditional notions of adolescent literacy instruction can provide a catalyst to academic achievement and engagement.

Practical implications: Designing effective literacy practices for today’s adolescents requires following a basic set of guidelines that considers such factors as student’s backgrounds, experiences, and prior knowledge. These factors are particularly important in determining where to begin instruction with each student, and how to proceed.

Job Corps is the United State’s largest and most comprehensive training program for disadvantaged youth aged 16–24 years old. A randomized social experiment concluded that, on average, individuals benefited from the program in the form of higher weekly earnings and employment prospects. At the same time, “young adults” (ages 20–24) realized much higher impacts relative to “adolescents” (ages 16–19). Employing recent nonparametric bounds for causal mediation, we investigate whether these two groups’ disparate effects correspond to them benefiting differentially from distinct aspects of Job Corps, with a particular focus on the attainment of a degree (GED, high school, or vocational). We find that, for young adults, the part of the total effect of Job Corps on earnings (employment) that is due to attaining a degree within the program is at most 41% (32%) of the total effect, whereas for adolescents that part can account for up to 87% (100%) of the total effect. We also find evidence that the magnitude of the part of the effect of Job Corps on the outcomes that works through components of Job Corps other than degree attainment (e.g., social skills, job placement, residential services) is likely higher for young adults than for adolescents. That those other components likely play a more important role for young adults has policy implications for more effectively servicing participants. More generally, our results illustrate how researchers can learn about particular mechanisms of an intervention.

This study examines the relative influence of adolescent job characteristics upon girls’ and boys’ educational and occupational aspirations.

Using data from the 2010 Monitoring the Future Project, a nationally representative sample of high school seniors in the United States, descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses are used to examine variations in girls’ and boys’ aspirations. The analyses are conducted with a life-course theoretical framework.

Overall, girls are shown to have greater aspirations for attaining a college degree and a professional career, as compared to boys. However, the relationship between teenagers’ job characteristics and adult statuses is shown to be substantially stronger among boys. For both sexes, work hours are associated with lower aspirations, yet the particular type of job responsibilities, such as office work, increased the aspirations for both females and males.

The findings strongly support the contention that the development of educational and occupational aspirations is readily influenced by the context of work experiences during the teen years. Given the variations shown in the aspirations and work experiences of adolescent girls and boys, future researcher should attempt to more precisely examine the work experiences of teens and discern how these may affect other developmental processes.

This study extends the current research literature by examining the distinct differences in the work experiences of adolescent girls and boys and how those experiences potentially influence the development of educational and occupational goals.

This chapter examines whether the racial identification of mixed-race adolescents can be understood through several theories: Status Maximization Theory, the rule of hypodescent, or social identity theory. Status Maximization theory posits that mixed-race adolescents will attempt to identify as the highest racial status group they possibly can. The rule of hypodescent or hypodescent theory, also known as the one-drop rule, is a legacy of the Plantation-era South and prescribes that mixed-race individuals identify as their lowest status racial identity. Social identity theory posits that the higher frequency or quality of contacts with parents or individuals in mixed-race adolescents’ peer networks affect the racial identification of mixed-race adolescents. Also, social identity contends that a mixed-race adolescent's intergroup dynamic (measured here as a child's level of self-esteem, whether there is prejudice at school, and a child's self-concept) dictates how he or she will racially identify. Through analyses of mixed-race adolescents in the National Longitudinal Adolescent Health (Add Health), I find that Asian-white and American-Indian-white adolescents do not status maximize nor abide by hypodescent, while black-white adolescents do not status maximize but do adhere to hypodescent when forced to choose one race. There is no tendency for the frequency or quality of contact with parents, romantic partners, or school composition to affect racial identity, as predicted by social identity theory. Yet, several of the aforementioned social-psychological variables are found to influence the racial identification of mixed-race adolescents. Specifically, whether they felt positively about school, if they experienced prejudice, whether they had higher levels of self-esteem, and if they felt socially accepted by their peers. Another key finding from this research suggests that racial identification for Asian-white and American-Indian-white adolescents are both fluid and optional; this is not the case for black-white adolescents. I conclude by offering the implications of these findings for black-white multiracial individuals.