Adolescents' future in the balance of family, school, and the neighborhood: A multidimensional application of two theoretical perspectives
Social Science Quarterly 103(3):534-49 (with Jaap Nieuwenhuis)
Family, school and neighborhood contexts provide children with cultural resources that may foster their ambitions and bolster their academic performance. Reference group theory instead highlights how seemingly positive settings can depress educational performance as well as aspirations and expectations. We test these competing claims by drawing on data from the British Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N=4,968). We find that, generally, childhood school and neighborhood deprivation is negatively associated with adolescents’ school performance, aspirations and expectations, in line with the cultural resource perspective. However, important exceptions to this pattern point to reference group processes for (1) children from low-educated parents, whose academic aspirations are especially low when they either went to an affluent school or lived in an affluent neighborhood—but not both, and (2) for children from highly-educated parents attending poor schools, whose realistic expectations of the future are higher than their peers in affluent schools.
click for PDF | doi: 10.1111/ssqu.13137 (open access)