Dimensions of concerns: The case of Turkish adolescence

The purpose of the present study is to explore the type and seriousness of concerns reported by Turkish adolescents and to investigate the association of these concerns with self-reported psychological distress. The subjects were 957 secondary school students, 471 females and 486 males (ages 11 to 19) sampled from six different schools representing three socioeconomic status levels in Ankara, Turkey. A 40-item, Adolescent Concerns Scale was administered to subjects together with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) and the UCLA Loneliness Scale. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that the concerns could be grouped into five distinct clusters. These were concerns related to "personal future", "interpersonal relations", "local-universal issues", "social identity" and "use of drugs". Among them, "concerns over social identity issues" were found to be related to and predicting the anxiety scores. Even though concerns over the "use of drugs" received the lowest rating, as a factor subscale this cluster was also found to be related to depression, anxiety and loneliness scores. The results were compared with the four-factor model of adolescent concerns proposed by Violato and Holden (1988). Cultural differences were observed in the ranking of the importance attributed to each concern cluster. Copyright © 1995 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.