Adolescent Achievement Behavior, Family Authority Structure, and Parental Socialization Practices

Abstract

With data from 1,455 freshman males in seven urban and suburban, public and parochial high schools in the southern tier of New York, an empirical evaluation of four themes relating adolescent achievement (operationalized as level of education expectation) to family structure and parental socialization rendered tenable the following propositions: (1) level of expectation varies positively with the frequency of several specified parental achievement training practicies; (2) the frequency of such parental practices is not storngly associated with socio-economic status; (3) a larger percentage of respondents reporting "democratic" authority relationships with their parents; and (4) while the magnitude of the positive relationship between expectations and achievement training practices was attenuated in the autocratic vis-a-vis the democratic authority structure, that attenuation was restricted primarily to (a) those achievement training practices termed "Evaluations," (b) the father-son authority structure, and (c) the blue- but not the white-collar status category.