Ethnicity, Family Environment and Social-Status Attainment: A Follow-up Analysis

Abstract

In this study longitudinal data were used to examine relationships among family context, adolescents’ aspirations and young adults’ social-status attainment. The investigation was a follow-up study of two previous investigations that were published in this Journal. In the sample were 21-year-old Australians from Anglo Australian, Greek and Southern Italian families. Regression surfaces were constructed from hierarchical models that examined possible linear, interaction and curvilinear associations among the variables. Typically the findings indicated that a family context measure, defined by parents’ aspirations and adolescents’ perceptions of their parents’ support for learning, was a moderate to strong predictor of young adults’ status attainment. Also, the results revealed that family context continued to be an important variable in the analysis of relationships between adolescents’ aspirations and the status attainment of young adults from different ethnic groups.