On Latent School Refusal in Junior High School

Abstract: School refusal is a grave social problem for adolescents, their families, schools andsociety in Japan today as well as other developed countries. We researched the mentality of junior high school pupils about their feelings or moods toward school attendance with a set of questionnaires in order to know how much they were oppressed by daily schoolattendance.
From such a viewpoint, we tried the questionnaire program at seven public junior highschools in a small city in the suburbs that developed rapidly and located not far away from a big city. We selected our subjects at random from one class out of each grade of each junior high school. The number of the subject pupils was 838: 429 boys and 409 girls. We postulated that the latent school refusals were those who answered all "yes" to three items which was always the case by school refusals in our climical experience. We found 117 latent school refusals out of the 838: 65 boys and 52 girls.
We considered three factors–problems concerning school, family and other daily activities.
From our research, we recognize that there are many pupils attending school with the possibility of them becoming dropouts (14.0%). Their mentality is characteristic of school refusal itself while they attend school almost everyday. We clinicians should be aware of the social structure and make every effort to secure the healthy development of adolescents.