The Pediatric Hospital Staff's Knowledge of Normal Adolescent Development

Pediatric residents, nurses, and other hospital staff members often receive very limited training in adolescent psychology during their schooling. Often the training they do receive is psycho-analytically oriented and stresses that adolescence is a period of tumultous development in which symptomatic behavior is quite common and psychiatric disturbances are transient. This study surveyed the beliefs of pediatric residents (N = 13), nurses (N = 20), and adjunct personnel (N = 12) about adolescent turmoil and the transitory nature of symptoms displayed during adolescence. The survey questionnaire consisted of 9 true-false items concerning the frequency and severity of parent-adolescent conflicts, the frequency of various symptoms, and the adolescent's likelihood of “growing out of” such problems by adulthood. The results indicated a tendency among respondents to consider neurotic and antisocial behaviors to be more common than some recent studies suggest they are, and falsely to believe adolescents “grow out of” their psychiatric problems. Implications of these findings are discussed.