ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how male adolescents who vary in their coping styles adapt to different high school environments. It considers three concepts for the adolescent experience: identity, competence, and exploration preferences. Identity is a universal term used with diverse connotations; it retains little specific meaning. Its status as a psychological concept is barely intact. Sense of competency is defined simply as the individual's self-report experience of being able to do something well. A competency is any behavior or set of behaviors that constitutes a perceived skill. The interviewers as a group undertook a training program designed to assure optimal and standard use of the interview protocol as an assessment procedure. The independent variable of exploration at least benefited from some operational definition: scores on an experimental questionnaire. The chapter confirms the general hypothesis that the school environments distinguish between students on several dependent measures.
