Drop-In Seminar - Is risk-taking among adolescent girls increasing?

Speaker: Professor Joan Abbott-Chapman

Topic: Is risk-taking among adolescent girls increasing?

Venue: The Kilburn Institute, St Michael's Collegiate School        

Cost: Free         

Contact: Pru Francis prufrancis@netspace.net.au

Joan is a Fellow of ACE and in 2002 was awarded the ACE Tasmania Award for a 'significant contribution to education in Australia and overseas'. She is a Professor of Education at the University of Tasmania where she has held a number of research and teaching positions since 1984. Prior to that she held appointments at the Universities of York and Bristol UK and New York University USA. She has researched and published widely on factors influencing student participation and achievement, especially of disadvantaged and rural youth.

Research, Joan conducted with Professor Carey Denholm, also an ACE Fellow, has focussed on the extent to which secondary students engage in potentially harmful risky behaviour, including drug and alcohol abuse, and factors which encourage or inhibit risk-taking, including educational and social engagement or disengagement.

In this talk Joan will briefly present some of the findings from the adolescent risk research, and will discuss the ways in which gender differences in risk-taking appear to be diminishing, with adolescent girls now reporting participating in various kinds of risky activity to the same extent as boys. Intergenerational differences revealed by a parallel parents' survey suggest the greatest change is the increasing levels of binge drinking among teenage girls, with implications for other forms of risky activity.