Australian Families and Adolescents’ Aspirations: A Follow-up Analysis

Abstract

The study was a follow-up investigation of research previously reported in this journal. Relationships were examined between the educational and occupational aspirations of adolescents from different ethnic groups and their perceptions of learning contexts after taking into account the affects on the aspirations of earlier measures of individual characteristics and family environments. Data were collected from Australian 16-year-olds (260 Anglo Australian, 120 Greek, and 90 Southern Italian) to assess their perceptions of parent, peer, teacher and school support for learning. Five years earlier, data had been collected of their social status, ability, family environment, academic achievement and attitudes to school. Blockwise selection and the calculation of sheaf coefficients were used in path models to examine the influences on aspirations. The results suggested that there were ethnic group differences in the extent to which parents’ aspirations and adolescents’ perceptions of significant others’ influence acted as a regulator of the affects of other variables on adolescents’ educational and occupational aspirations. It is proposed that in future research, sub-environments which are related to particular individual characteristics should be defined. In those sub-environments, elements should be isolated that are either shared or are specific to various environmental influences. Also, the findings suggest that environment measures need to be examined to determine whether they act as regulatory threshold variables in relation to other influences on adolescents’ school-related outcomes.