For the last issue of the year the journal reverts to a mix of papers after the special edition on psycho-educational assessment. The first is a paper on career choice of Australian secondary school students by Natal'ya Galliott, Linda Graham and Naomi Sweller. We really appreciate these papers on careers as so few are submitted to the journal. Hopefully if you find this paper interesting you might consider writing something on this aspect of our work either as a research paper or for the practitioners’ section of the journal.

This article reports findings from an empirical study examining the influence of student background and educational experiences on the development of career choice capability. Secondary school students attending Years 9–12 (N = 706) in New South Wales, Australia, were invited to participate in an online survey that sought to examine factors influencing their readiness to make a career choice. The survey included questions relating to student demographics, parental occupation, attitudes to school and to learning, career aspirations, and students’ knowledge of the further education or skills required to achieve their desired goal. We found no significant differences in the proportions of students who were ‘uncertain’ of their future career aspirations with respect to their individual characteristics, such as age and gender. There were, however, significant differences in relation to students’ family background, and their perceptions associated with their own academic abilities and self-efficacy.

This study investigated the social, emotional and mental wellbeing predictors of bullying victimisation and perpetration for boarding students following the transition from primary school to secondary boarding school. Longitudinal data on 76 male and 74 female boarding students in Grades 7, 8 and 9 was used from a larger longitudinal study of 3,462 students. A spike in frequency of bullying perpetration occurred immediately after the transition to secondary school and boarding school, with an increase in bullying perpetration continuing to occur throughout the following 2 years. Those boarding students reporting higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms were significantly more at risk of frequent bullying victimisation at the beginning of Grade 8, while boarding students experiencing conduct problems and emotional difficulties were more likely to engage in frequent bullying perpetration. Peer support and feeling safe were found to be factors most likely to decrease frequent bullying victimisation. The sustained nature of bullying behaviour highlights the importance of addressing attitudes towards bullying both prior to and immediately after the commencement of boarding school. It is recommended that boarding schools adopt a targeted and systematic whole school approach to bullying prevention, while promoting positive interactions and relationships with peers.

Victims use social support seeking (SSS) to buffer the negative effects of cyberbullying. It is unknown whether cyber-victims’ perceptions of harm and having poor peer and parental relationships influence SSS. Using a sample of 451 cyberbullying-victims, aged 12–18, 68% girls, this study examined relationships of gender, harm, peer rejection, parental attachment, offline victimisation and online aggression to SSS, and tested the interaction of harm with peer rejection and parental attachment. Findings from logistic regression revealed that poor parental attachment and higher peer rejection decreased SSS, and that the association between parental attachment and SSS was stronger among cyber-victims with higher harm. This study highlights the importance of assessing cyber-victims’ attachment and experiences with their peers when implementing preventative intervention programs.

Increasing ethnic and cultural diversity worldwide and especially in Australia requires that psychologists and counsellors cultivate the knowhow to interact and work effectively with clients and stakeholders in cross-cultural contexts. This study aimed to identify and compare themes regarding challenging intercultural social scenarios experienced by supervising, practising and intern psychologists. Transcripts from five focus groups were open-coded on four occasions and the final themes compared with the EXCELL (Excellence in Cultural Experiential Learning and Leadership) program's six key sociocultural competencies (Mak, Westwood, Barker, & Ishiyama, 1998). We found that many challenges reported by psychologists (regardless of their qualifications) were related to difficulties — for psychologists and clients — in executing one or more of key sociocultural competencies: seeking help or information, participating in a group, making social contact, giving feedback, refusing a request, and expressing disagreement. We also identified barriers to cultural competence in therapeutic relationships, including cultural identity issues, needing to address difficulties in intimate relationships, cultural variation in values/beliefs/social norms, mismatched expectations, psychologists’ perceived deficit in intercultural training, and challenges in self-reflection. Based on our findings, we propose a model of culturally competent counselling practice and discuss implications for counsellor and psychologist training, and for future research.

This article reports on a qualitative study that set out to understand stakeholders’ perception of the school counselling service in Singapore. Using semi-structured interviews, this study explored the perceptions of three main stakeholder groups, namely teachers and counsellors working within the schools and those working in the communities. Altogether, 19 interviews were conducted. Two key theme areas were uncovered. First, the stakeholders observed and expected differing levels of confidentiality for information obtained during counselling. This presented a barrier for cooperation between the stakeholders. Second, stakeholders, while keen to ensure students’ families were served appropriately, held different ideas of how that could happen. No clear model of collaboration seemed to exist at the time of the study. Implications for practice were discussed.

This exploratory study involved a structured group-games intervention to develop first-grade students’ social competence. The effects were evaluated by assessing possible outcomes for the children's social status. A sample of 119 first-grade, mixed-ability students from a Hong Kong primary school participated in the sessions (63 boys, 56 girls: mean age 74 months). Sessions were led by trained parent-volunteers and involved a 60-minute session each week for 8 weeks in the children's own classrooms. Peer nominations were used before and after intervention to assess participants’ social status under five possible categories ― popular, rejected, controversial, neglected and average. Improvement in children's social awareness and social status was noted following the intervention. Children's competence in playing group games was found to be positively correlated with their social acceptance. The findings support the value of early social intervention in classrooms as a practical way for preparing first-grade students for primary school life.

The current study investigated the moderating effects of gender, age, and weight status on the relationship between body dissatisfaction and depression among adolescents. Data were collected on body dissatisfaction, depression, and demographic characteristics from a convenience sample of 1,101 adolescents (505 girls, 596 boys). The relationship between body dissatisfaction and depression differed significantly by weight status (β = −0.318, p < .01), but not gender or age. In addition, their association varied across weight status only in males (βs = 0.501, 0.240, and 0.178 for underweight, normal weight, and overweight respectively, ps < .05) and the early adolescence group (βs = 0.523, 0.282, 0.297 for underweight, normal weight, and overweight respectively, ps < .01). The findings indicated that the association of body dissatisfaction with depression was significant among nearly all weight-status groups of adolescents, and varied across weight status among males and early adolescence groups. This suggests that the prevention programs that aim to reduce depression by reducing body dissatisfaction in adolescents should include all weight-status groups, and pay close attention to underweight adolescents (especially underweight boys and early adolescents who are underweight).