Well, I am delighted. Someone actually emailed me to say they had read the last editorial!!! AND we have two practitioner papers for the issue with another two in the system. Great news on both counts.
Here is another good Christmas holiday read in store for you in this edition with a variety of papers.
The first is by Catherine King, Mirjana Subotic-Kerry and Bridianne O'Dea who examined the extremely important and timely topic of school counsellors’ burnout. We look after the mental health of our students but sometimes at a cost to our own mental health. The authors conducted a survey in secondary schools in NSW and found that about half of the respondents had experienced burnout. There were four factors which were most associated with counsellor burnout; lower workload manageability, lower satisfaction with school mental healthcare, great impact of work stress on wellbeing and greater frequency of providing care outside of school hours. The message is clear; we must look after ourselves and support each other.
The next article is also from NSW by Jae Yup Jung looking at gifted and talented students and their difficulty with occupational and career making decisions. It was found that family influences and an idocentric orientation towards the future were helpful in these students making career decisions. The following paper is also about high-ability early adolescents. Cici Sze Lam, Patch P. S. Yeung and Mantak Yuen interviewed 21 such students in Hong Kong and found four of the six influences for their school satisfaction were aspects of the school environment. The first was positive teacher-student relationships, classmates’ emotional and instrumental support, and their parents’ involvement with their learning and talent development opportunities.
Shaun Huang and Alexander Mussap's paper is on international students, specifically from Asia, studying at Australian universities. While hopefully these students benefit from their study and the university and community benefit from their presence, these students experience some problems with adjustment-related stress. The authors found that maladaptive perfectionism influences depression indirectly by increasing acculturative stress.
Loneliness can be a devastating condition, even being considered Australia's next public health epidemic, which is often not recognised in young people. Ayse Ulu-Yalcinkaya and Ayhan Demir explored family predictors of loneliness after controlling for age, grade, school type, birth order and number of siblings in a high school population. They found that parental acceptance-rejection explained loneliness in these adolescents more than sibling relationships and demographic variables. The last article by Marko Ostojic, Jasmine Chung, Michael DiMattia, Brett Furlonger, Margerita Busaca and Philip Chittleborough examines how school psychologists and counsellors can evaluate health-related apps for behavioural change in students. Despite finding taxonomies useful to identify the amount of behaviour changes content in the apps, how the apps actually changed behaviour still requires research.
Happy reading and happy holidays.
