Home Environment and Behavioral Development During Early Adolescence: The Mediating and Moderating Roles of Self-Efficacy Beliefs

Abstract

The role of self-efficacy beliefs as a mediator and moderator of the relation between the home environment and well-being was examined for both European American and African American children ages 10 through 15. There was evidence that self-efficacy beliefs pertaining to school and to family functioned as a mediator between EAHOME scores and social behavior and also between EA-HOME scores and an overall problems index. The effects occurred in both ethnic groups but more often in European American adolescents. Likewise, self-efficacy beliefs pertaining to peers and to family served to moderate the relation between HOME scores and social behavior, achievement test scores, and the overall problems index. Again, however, the effects were largely restricted to European Americans. As a time of transition, early adolescence engenders substantial concerns about one’s self-regulatory capacities and one’s ability to control what happens at home, at school, among peers, and in the community. It is a time for reformulating personal efficacy beliefs and a time of exercising beliefs about one’s agency toward newly emerging goals (see Eccles & Midgley, 1989, for an illustration). As the environment begins to afford new opportunities and make new demands, children must construct new approaches for dealing with those opportunities and demands. According to Bandura (1997), if the environment provides conditions supportive of positive efficacy beliefs, then adaptive functioning in adolescence is more readily achieved. More specifically, Bandura claims that human agency operates within an interdependent causal structure involving