Adolescent Runaways: The Significance Between Non-Runaways and Runaways and Their Perceptions of Self, Their Parents and Their World

Adolescents who run away from home cause major problems for themselves, for their parents, and for society. In this study runaways (n = 112) are compared to non-runaways (n = 211) in their perceptions- of self, their parents and the world in which they live by use of a self-reporting survey. It was hypothesized that runaways would have perceptions of self, parents, and the world that would be skewed to society\u27s unacceptable end of the scale. T-tests were performed on the difference of the means of each variable for the runaways and non-runaways. Out of 13 variables for each, a total of 39, seventeen variables were found to be significant (p \u3c 0.05). The findings demonstrated that the runaways\u27 perception is skewed more to the unacceptable end of the scale than are the non-runaways