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A document describing the background and study requirements was sent to secondary schools who had previously indicated interest in collaborating with the University of Birmingham. Schools who expressed interest in taking part in the current study were provided with more detailed information and further arrangements regarding the testing were made. In return for the schools taking part in the research, members of the research team offered talks related to their research expertise, shared their experiences of studying psychology with the students and gave students more insight in the ins and outs of conducting research. Parents/legal guardians of the students gave written informed consent for their child to take part in the research prior to the testing day. Students themselves gave written assent on the testing day. Ethical approval was granted by the School of Psychology Ethics Board of the University of Birmingham. 356 students (204 females: 152 males corresponding to 57.3% and 42.7% of the sample) from 7 secondary schools in the West Midlands, United Kingdom, were recruited for this study. The only exclusion criterion was non-fluency in English. Socioeconomic status of the students was mixed with 42.4% of the students attending an independent (private) school and 57.6% attending a comprehensive state school. 273 students (70% of the total sample, 157 females: 116 males) had a maximum of 10% of any subscale measures missing. For these participants missing values were replaced with the mean of the person’s scores on that subscale [44], and their data with missing values imputed were included in further analysis. Data of the remaining 30% (n = 83) were excluded; they did not differ from the included sample. 75.5% of the final sample were born in the United Kingdom. Ethnicity was 46.9% white, 20.9% Asian-Indian, 11.0% Asian-Oriental, 8.1% Black/African-Caribbean, 7.7% mixed and 5.5% other ethnic background.
The Adolescent Risk-Taking Questionnaire (ARQ) [45] is a two-part questionnaire that assesses adolescent risk-taking behaviours in addition to perceptions of the risk of these behaviours. The questionnaire contains 44 items that are rated on a 5-point Likert scale for judgment of riskiness (e.g. “Put a cross in the box corresponding to the word that best describes your opinion about how risky you think each situation or behaviour is: smoking”) and frequency of participation in the behaviours (e.g. “Put a cross in the box corresponding to the word that best describes your behaviour: smoking”). The ARQ has adequate internal reliability with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.7 to 0.79 for the antisocial subscales and Cronbach’s alphas exceeding 0.8 for the other subscales for males, females, young adolescents and older adolescents [30]. For the current study, Cronbach’s alphas ranged from 0.40 to 0.83 with poor internal consistency for items referring to thrill-seeking and reckless risk behaviour and good internal consistency for items referring to rebellious risk behaviour. The Behavioral Inhibition System/Behavioral Activation System (BIS/BAS) scales [21] assess motivational systems that underlie behaviour and affect. The behavioural inhibition system (BIS) is sensitive to punishment, non-reward, and novelty, and is associated with inhibition of behaviour that may result in negative outcomes (e.g. “I worry about making mistakes”). The behavioural activation system (BAS) is sensitive to reward, non-punishment and escape from punishment. There are three BAS subscales: drive (e.g. “I go out of my way to get things I want”), fun-seeking (e.g. “I'm always willing to try something new if I think it will be fun”) and reward responsiveness (e.g. “When I get something I want, I feel excited and energized”) which, for the purpose of this study, have been summed to get a total score that is associated with behaviour aimed to obtain reward. The questionnaire consists of 24 items, rated on a 4-point Likert scale, and has adequate internal reliability with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.68 to 0.88 on the subscales for participants in the US, UK and Italy [46] and 0.55 to 0.73 for the current study. The BIS/BAS scales also have adequate convergent and discriminant validity [21]. The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) [47] is the most widely used self-report measure of impulsivity [48] and assesses impulsiveness in the form of attentional (e.g. “I have “racing” thoughts”), motor (e.g. “I do things without thinking”) and non-planning impulsivity (e.g. “I get easily bored when solving thought problems”). The measure consists of 30 items that are rated on a 4-point Likert scale and summed to obtain a total score for impulsiveness. The BIS-11 has adequate internal reliability with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.79 to 0.83 for undergraduate students, substance-abuse patients, general psychiatric patients and prison inmates [47] and 0.52 to 0.68 for the current study. The Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) and the Social Phobia Scale (SPS) [49] assess anxiety symptoms related to initiating and maintaining interactions with people in social situations as well as anxiety symptoms in relation to performance of various tasks while being observed by other people (e.g. SIAS “When mixing socially, I am uncomfortable”; e.g. SPS “I become nervous if I have to write in front of other people”). Both scales consist of 20 items, rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and are summed to obtain a score representing anxiety related to social situations. The scales have good to excellent internal reliability with Cronbach’s alphas of 0.9 for the SPS and 0.88 and 0.9 for the SIAS for undergraduate and community samples respectively [49] and 0.94 for the SPS and 0.92 for the SIAS in the current study.
Students completed the questionnaires in their classrooms. They were asked to answer the questions honestly and not discuss their answers with their friends while completing the measures. Questionnaire items that were difficult to understand were explained in a standardised way that was agreed between the researchers prior to the start of the study. Students were given a sheet that included contact details of organisations for advice on mental health. The duration of a typical testing session was 40–50 minutes.
Data were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 21 and IBM SPSS Amos 21 for Windows (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY). Path analysis was employed to investigate the influence of personality characteristics on adolescents’ perception of risk and their risk-taking behaviour with plausibility of the postulated relationships being indicated by a good fitting model [50, 51]. Models were estimated using a maximum likelihood algorithm and model fit was judged using guidelines provided by Byrne (2001), Hu & Bentler (1999) and Kline (1998). Path coefficients and the amount of variance explained by the model (R2) were examined and the following goodness of fit measures are reported: the model χ², Root Mean Squared Error of Approximation (RMSEA) with its 90% confidence intervals, Bentler’s Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), Standardised Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) and Aikaike’s Information Criterion (AIC).
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