School Refusal Research Paper

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(i) School refusal Going to school for the first time is often hard for children, but some children end up refusing to go to school. According to Havik, Bru and Ertesvåg (2013) we’re talking about school refusal when the child’s refusal of going to school is related to the emotional distress the child experienced during social or academic situations during school time. Kearney (2008) describes school refusal behavior as a dimensional, heterogeneous construct which can consist of school attendance under duress which leads to pleading for skipping school, bad behavior before going to school in order to avoid it, repeated tardiness, repeated absence from school or missing classes and absence from school for a really long time. School refusal is problematic when the student misses more than 50 percent of his or her classes for at least two weeks and not because the student has an illness or is homeschooled. These students also need to show problematic behavior or anxiety for the school refusal to be problematic. Not only is going to school important for one’s wellbeing but also one’s social life. School refusal leads to more antisocial behavior and worse health (Heyne & Sauter, 2013). It is valuable to look more into the contributing factors of school refusal because in order to get the absent …show more content…

Also, the study included only 17 parents and the majority had a higher education and still had a good relationship with the other parent. The research would have been better if they selected different kinds of family situations (low or high income and low or high education) more equally. Although their sample is drawn from different communities, the most are still all from the same region in Norway. Furthermore, the interview had open questions and was flexible, this means that not all the questions were the same for every parent. There was also no control group to compare

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