Of the 89 school attendance reports requested directly
from schools, 82 reports were returned (92%). As shown
in Table I, the average number of school days missed per
month was 2.88 days per school report and 2.90 days per
parent report (Pearson r¼.880), which indicates a high
level of concordance between school and parent report.
As noted in prior studies, there was a great deal of variability
in school absences (SD¼2.89 days per month;
range¼0–15.35) and the distribution of school absences
was positively skewed with about two-thirds of the adolescents
(68.8%) missing three days or less of school per
month, and about one third missing more than 3 days of
school per month.