DIMENSIONS OF CONCERNS - THE CASE OF TURKISH ADOLESCENTS

The purpose of the present study is to explore the type and seriousnes s of concerns reported by Turkish adolescents and to investigate the a ssociation 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 socio-economic status levels in Ankara, Turkey. A 40-item, Adol escent Concerns Scale was administered to subjects together with the B eck Depression Inventory (BDI), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) and the UCLA Loneliness Scale. An exploratory factor analysis reveale d that the concerns could be grouped into five distinct clusters. Thes e were concerns related to ''personal future'', interpersonal relation s'', ''local-universal issues'', ''social identity'' and ''use of drug s''. Among them, ''concerns over social identity issues'' were found t o be related to and predicting the anxiety scores. Even though concern s over the ''use of drugs'' received the lowest rating, as a factor su bscale this cluster was also found to be related to depression, anxiet y and loneliness scores. The results were compared with the four-facto r model of adolescent concerns proposed by Violato and Holden (1988). Cultural differences were observed in the ranking of the importance at tributed to each concern cluster.