The Relationship of Adolescents' Perceptions of Family Environments to Earlier Measures of Environmental Characteristics and Academic Achievement

Abstract

The study was a follow-up investigation of research previously reported in this journal. Data were collected from 16-year-old Australians (266 females, 250 males) to examine relationships between their perceptions of family learning environments and measures of social status, parental perception of family environment, and academic achievement, that had been assessed five years earlier. Regression surfaces were constructed from hierarchical models that examined possible linear, interaction, and curvilinear relationships among the variables. The findings indicated that the perceived family learning environments had negligible to moderate associations with the predictor measures. By constructing response surfaces, however, the study suggested the possible complexity of relationships of adolescents' perceptions of environments to earlier environmental and cognitive variables. Implications for the potential validity of self-report measures of student perception of parent support for learning relative to a criterion of academic attainment are discussed briefly.