Relations among school assets, individual resilience, and student engagement for youth grouped by level of family functioning

Abstract

AbstractGiven the importance of student engagement for healthy outcomes, research needs to investigate whether school‐based assets promote student engagement beyond individual and family influences. Unfortunately, such research has been limited by a lack of valid instrumentation. After examining the psychometrics of the California Healthy Kids Survey Resilience Youth Development Module, we used this risk and resilience instrument with a randomly selected sample of 10,000 diverse 7th‐, 9th‐, and 11th‐grade students to test a model of relations between school assets, individual resilience, and student engagement for students grouped by level of family assets. Although youth in the low family asset group reported lower student engagement, contrary to hypothesis, multigroup structural equation modeling revealed that school assets did not have a differential relation for low family asset youth compared to their high family asset peers. School assets were associated with student engagement for all groups, even accounting for individual resilience. Implications and future directions are provided. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.