La fonction d'ouverture au monde par le pere et l'itinerance a l'adolescence

After having run away once or several times, an increasingly important number of adolescents who run away from the home of their biological or foster parents end up living on the street. Thus they experience adolescence, a critical period in their psychosocial development, in this high-risk environment. The danger inherent in life on the street has motivated researchers to devote considerable time to the study of the correlations involved in the flight and homelessness of adolescents. The parental variables are over-represented among the correlates and researchers have not yet identified what exactly among the parental variables is linked to adolescents' chronic living away from their parents' home or what is attributable to each of the parents. The objective of our research is to fill this gap. We are interested principally in the contribution of paternal involvement and we propose to verify whether there exists a relationship between the phenomenon of adolescents living as homeless and the function of openness to the world carried out by the father. The function of openness to the world constituted by activities of stimulation and control and observed particularly in father-child interaction is linked to indicators of social adaptation while homelessness is a failure of social adaptation. We work with the following hypotheses: (1) The function of openness to the world carried out by the father is associated with the phenomenon of adolescents living as homeless. (2) The function of openness to the world carried out by the father has a stronger link with the phenomenon of adolescents living as homeless than the function of openness to the world carried out by the mother.;Keywords. homelessness, openness to the world, father involvement, adolescents, runaway, social adaptation, stimulation, control;In the first study, the main questionnaire for the research, the "Openness to the World Questionnaire -- for Adolescents" (QOMA in French) was validated on a group of 908 adolescents of both sexes between 12 and 17 years old, coming from different family structures and ethnic and socio-economic settings. The factorial analyses confirmed the two-dimension structure (stimulation, control) of the model of openness to the world and its pertinence. The QOMA is comprised of five factors, each of which have a good internal consistency and a satisfactory test-retest reliability. In the second study, 97 adolescents of both sexes aged between 14 and 19 years filled out the QOMA and questionnaires on affective deficiencies and physical and sexual abuse. The sample was made up of two groups: one of adolescents living as homeless and the other of adolescents living at their parents' home. The logistic regression reveals that paternal stimulation and discipline (control) are related to the classification of adolescents as homeless or living at home and that paternal stimulation, moderated by the identity of the one who exercises the role of social father, continues to be linked to the classification of adolescents above and beyond the contribution of the other pertinent variables. Finally, they reveal that maternal stimulation and discipline (control) are not significantly related to the classification of adolescents in the presence of these variables.