A Study of Adolescent's Strengths and Difficulties and Academic Self-Regulation

Behavior is governed by some kind of motivation or regulation which is broadly categorized as intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Every individual regardless of gender has some strength and some difficulties in regulating behavior. The present piece of research has been conducted to study gender differences in adolescents in relation to their perceived strengths and difficulties, as well as their capacity for academic self-regulation. For this, a sample of 54 boys and 46 girls was taken. They all belonged to the age group of 11-13 and were studying in an urban English medium public school. They were administered the strengths and difficulties questionnaire by Goodman (2002) and the academic self-regulation questionnaire (SRQ-A) by Ryan and Connell (1989). The strength and difficulty questionnaire has four scales namely the emotional symptoms scale, conduct problems scale, hyperactivity scale and peer problems scale that comprise the total difficulty score, and the prosocial scale that signifies the strength score. The SRQ-A has four sub-scales that represent four different regulatory styles namely external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, and intrinsic motivation. The data were collected and were further rendered to statistical analysis. T-test was applied to find out the differences between the two groups on various dimensions.