Bridging the gap among professionals who address youths with school absenteeism: Overview and suggestions for consensus

Over decades of study, problematic school absenteeism in youths has been associated with diverse terms such as truancy, psychoneurotic truancy, school refusal, school phobia, and separation anxiety. Unfor-tunately, such disparity has led to lack of consensus regarding definition, assessment, and treatment for this population. This is especially problematic given that school absenteeism and dropout remain at crisis proportions. A brief historical overview is presented of the various terms used to define subtypes of absenteeism. Suggestions are then made for building consensus among psychologists, educators, and others who address these youths. These suggestions surround using a common definitional and assessment approach as well as designing treatment strategies that cover all youths with problematic absenteeism. Problematic school absenteeism in youths has been researched and discussed extensively for over a century, receiving attention from psychologists of different theoretical orientations as well as educators, social workers, physicians, and others. A byproduct of this extensive attention, however, has been considerable disparity about fundamental concepts of definition, assessment, and treat-ment. Such disparity has been manifested by the presence of different sets of professionals who often evaluate a particular aspect of problematic school absenteeism at the expense of view-ing the population as a whole. As a result, practitioners, research-ers, and others are often “not on the same page ” when addressing students or clients, examining research samples, or classifying absentees. Such lack of consensus is especially problematic given that 5.5%–20.0 % of youths are absent from school on a given day and that 11.1 % of youths aged 16–24 years have dropped out o