Roll Call: A Scoping Review for School Attendance Problems Among Youth

Abstract

Regular school attendance is central to the psychosocial development of youth. Youth who frequently miss school face adverse consequences, including lower academic achievement, impaired socio-emotional development, mental health difficulties, and increased health risk behaviors. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light upon the issue of school attendance like never before. Nevertheless, school attendance problems (SAPs) have been studied for decades and diverse perspectives exist regarding how to define, conceptualize, and measure SAPs. Although this has proven advantageous to the field, there is poor comparability and limited integration across research disciplines to date. This complicates efforts towards prevention and intervention for SAPs. An interdisciplinary lens is more urgent than ever. This scoping review sought to examine the full range of ways that SAPs are conceptualized, operationally defined, assessed, and measured across the disciplines of psychology, education, medicine, criminology, and sociology. It presents notable points of consensus about the nature of SAPs within and across disciplines, identifies gaps in the extant literature on SAPs, and suggests future directions for research, policy, and practice. Study findings highlight an urgent need for more Canadian empirical research as well as the development and implementation of valid and multi-item measures for SAPs. In addition, future research examining SAPs from an inclusive bioecological systems framework is warranted. Implications for practitioners, educators, researchers, and policymakers are discussed.