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The transition from primary to secondary school comes with major changes in the lives of children. There is a shortage of in-depth analyses of young people's perspectives concerning their fears and strategies to address these. This qualitative study aims to gain first-hand understanding of children's fears and the intended coping strategies used during school transition. Data from 52 workshops were analysed, with a total of 896 students (M age = 10.40, SD = 0.839) in lower Austria. First, in the classroom setting, a vignette story about a child facing fears about school transition from primary to secondary school was developed with pupils in a brainstorming session. This was followed by self-selected small group discussions, where pupils proposed strategies to help cope with these fears. A thematic analysis was carried out. Major thematic clusters distinguished between four types of fears: peer victimisation, being alone, victimisation by authority figures, and academic failure. Three additional thematic clusters described strategies for countering the fears: enacting supportive networks, personal emotion regulation, and controlling behaviour. In addition to these connected clusters, two further themes were identified: strategy outcomes and consequences, i.e., personal experiences with using specific strategies, and the discussion of participants about contradictions and questionable usefulness of identified strategy outcomes. In conclusion, the children in our study reported more social fears as compared to academic fears. Children seem reasonably competent at naming and identifying strategies; however, maladaptive strategies, as well as controversies within the described strategies may indicate a lack of certainty and competence at engaging with these strategies on a practical level.

Stakeholder involvement in intervention development has become increasingly popular and is understood as crucial for successful implementation. However, methodological difficulties persist regarding the implementation of appropriate participatory methods to engage children and collect relevant information for intervention development. This paper discusses four creative, qualitative methods - a brainstorming task, an individual letter, a story-based task, and a focus group task - and compares their suitability to generate relevant information for early intervention development. These four methods were used in the early stages of a project aiming to develop a peer relationship intervention and were analysed using thematic analysis. Based on theoretical considerations, information categories (a) definition aspects, (b) context factors, and (c) change mechanisms were of interest, while (d) examples and experience and (e) additional information were identified as prevalent categories through inductive thematic analysis. Definition was a prevalent theme generated by the brainstorming task, although the sticky note format limited the depth of individual answers. The secret letter, which allowed children to share ideas privately, was found to be useful for generating more in-depth reflections on definitions and personal experiences. Stories and focus group discussions were found to be useful for generating varied context factors and change mechanisms, although stories also generated fictional elements and external solutions. Providing different qualitative methods and allowing children to choose how they prefer to communicate their thoughts proved important for collecting authentic, in-depth information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possibility of preventing prejudice among adolescents by promoting the analytical processing of social media content emerging from racial misinformation. Specifically, we propose, at this aim, an intervention that centers on recognizing stereotypical beliefs and other media biases about a group of people in misleading news. To better understand the variables that contribute to improving socio-analytical performance in the face of such misinformation, we investigated the influence of implicit associations as a tendency toward the automatic labeling of groups, as well as two dimensions of perceived self-efficacy in the face of misinformation, one active and one inhibitory. Our results demonstrate the presence of a negative link between affective prejudice and socio-analytical processing, and that this analytical performance toward misleading news is negatively related to the individual tendency toward implicit activation, and is also explained by the inhibitory factor of the perceived efficacy toward misinformation. The role of the active factor related to the perceived ability of fact-checking is not significant. This research suggests that education focused on the socio-analytical processing of misleading news in social media feeds can be an effective means of intervening in online affective prejudice among adolescents; the implications and limitations of our findings for future research in this area are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]