Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: Students' relationships and experiences in their neighborhood, school, family, and peer group have been shown to influence specific student-adaptation outcomes associated with school success. Moreover, each of these social environments may affect the individual differently over time. Consequently, it is important to identify those features of the social environment that can be leveraged at particular times in the developmental life span to promote school success.

The present research uses longitudinal data to examine how the perceptions of middle school students toward their social environments at one time point influence adaptation outcomes associated with school success at a later time point. These outcomes range from students' personal beliefs and well-being to students' school-related attitudes and behavior and their self-reported academic performance. From an eco-interactional developmental model, the balance of risks and assets in a student's social environment (proximal results) are assumed to influence that student's level of individual adaptation (intermediate and distal results). Results of the present investigation can inform the design and implementation of interventions to increase the school success of middle school students—an important transition period in the school success trajectory for adolescents.

Method: All student-level data are self-reported and are derived from repeated administrations of the School Success Profile (SSP) in 11 middle schools that were participating in a universal social intervention to promote the functioning of the schools as learning organizations. The SSP is an ecologically oriented survey that focuses on students within the context of neighborhood, school, family, and friends.

SSP surveys were administered to the population of students enrolled in each of the 11 middle schools in fall 2004 and in fall 2005. The overall response rate increased slightly, from 84% in 2004 to 88% in 2005. The analytical data set included 2,845 students—those known to have taken the SSP both times. Students were in middle school during both years of the study. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to account for students being nested within schools.

Results: Results of the analysis found that the social environment dimensions (in aggregate) vary in their contribution, ranging from 2% to 9% of the variance in each of the individual adaptation outcomes for students over time. Out of the four social environment domains, neighborhood and school had the fewest number of statistically significant effects (p < .01). Overall, a greater number of statistically significant effects were associated with the family domain. Family togetherness, one of the five family dimensions, explained a minimum of 1% of variance (β-squared) for social support use (β =.13), happiness (.10), and self-esteem (.10).

Conclusions and Implications: The results suggest that school practitioners working with students to increase personal beliefs and well-being associated with school success would be wise to invest time and resources in interventions that include parents/guardians, given that family was such an influential domain for youth. Further analysis is needed to explore how the effects of specific social environment dimensions on individual adaptation outcomes associated with school success may vary across sample subgroups.