Abstract
Premature home-leaving places adolescents at risk for a chronic pattern of underemployment and underachievement and is more likely to occur in children from remarried families. Reliable prediction of this detrimental outcome from patterns of stepfamily adjustment would be of significant clinical and social importance. In 1985, self-report data relating to stepfamily adjustment were gathered from a sample of adolescent members of newly remarried families in a Midwestern community using the Stepfamily Adjustment Scale (SAS), a research instrument containing twenty-one subscales. Beginning in 1990, this sample was contacted as they left home in an effort to determine if, in their view, they felt extruded from their families prematurely. Fifty-four of the original 93 participants were contacted. None of the SAS variables nor several structural variables were found to be related to reports of feeling extruded. Results suggest that stepfamily dynamics in the first year of remarriage may not be related to later extrusion of the adolescent. Future studies of extrusion should include data from parents and should utilize other, perhaps more observational methods.