In this article, the authors examine competing explanations for hypothesized family effects on adolescents’ educational outcome beliefs.Controlling on family socioeconomic status indicators, they find no support for the hypothesis that family composition affects outcome beliefs.Controlling on family structure, two measures of connection, including a dimension of parenting that promotes positive emotional ties between parents and children, have significant effects.They examine the robustness of the effects by controlling on variables known to affect educational outcomes and establish that the effects are not substantially diminished.Finally, they examine three measures of connection, varying from domain specific to global, and determine that the more targeted the measure, the stronger the association with educational outcome beliefs.The data consist of matched survey responses from a purposive sample of high school juniors (N = 203) and their mothers or guardians.Analysis is based on a series of ordinal logit models.
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