Educational and occupational aspirations of "common man" boys: Kahl's study revisited

The relationships between parents' getting-ahead-getting-by orientations, adolescents' perceptions of those parental orientations, and aspirations for adolescents with different levels of intellectual ability and from various social status backgrounds were examined. Data were collected from 516 Australian 16-year-olds (250 boys, 266 girls) and their parents. The adolescents were classified into four contexts defined by the median split of scores on intellectual ability and family social status. Within each ability-status context, relationships among the variables were examined by constructing regression surfaces that were formed from models that included terms to test for possible linear, interaction, and curvilinear associations. The findings suggest that (a) in each context, perceptions of parents' orientations had strong associations with adolescents' aspirations; (b) for adolescents from low ability-lower status contexts, perception of parents' orientations acted as a threshold variable such that they were related to aspirations only at medium to high perception levels; and (c) in each context, parents' aspirations were related to adolescents' educational aspirations at each level of adolescents' perceptions of parents' orientations.