School attitudes and adolescents' aspirations: ethnic group differences

In this study data were collected from 16-year-old Australians from Anglo-Australian, Greek and Southern Italian families to examine relations between adolescents' school-related attitudes and their educational and occupational aspirations, after taking into account the influence on aspirations of social status and intellectual ability. Regression surfaces were constructed from hierarchical models that examined possible linear, interaction and curvilinear associations between the variables. The findings suggest the propositions that: (a) social status acts as an allocation factor such that low social status inhibits associations between early school attitudes and later aspirations; (b) in relation to intellectual ability, attitudes of early schooling have negligible or modest unique associations with adolescents' aspirations; and (c) relationships between social status, intelligence, attitudes and aspirations vary for adolescents from different ethnic groups indicating that ethnicity is an important contextual variable to include in investigations of aspirations.