Identity-Based Motivation and School Outcomes: Parental and Neighborhood Assets

Background: The future self includes both positive (“I will be on the honor role”, “I will succeed in entering the career of my dreams”) and negative (“I will get bad grades”, “I will fail to finish college”) future images and possible identities (“I will be a doctor”, “I will be a teenaged mother”). These possible identities can serve as goal posts, guiding current action toward positive and away from negative outcomes. But people do not always act in ways that support their future self; students fail to engage enough time and effort in their schoolwork even though they want to succeed in their future life course and careers. The proposed identity-based motivation model helps explain why this gap occurs: The future self and the possible identities it entails cues current behavior only if the future self feels connected to the present self in context, making the future self relevant to current choices, not otherwise. Because there are many competing demands on attention, people are sensitive to relevance cues, though not necessarily sensitive to their source.

Methods: Prior research has demonstrated that both parental socio-economic status and neighborhood economic disadvantage is associated with having fewer strategies to attain positive school-focused possible identities such as attaining good grades or being on the honor role. The current study uses two data sets to examine the association between assets and school outcomes. Study 1 utilizes data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal and representative sample, to examine one meditational path, which is that higher parental assets are associated with higher parental expectations for educational success, and these expectations are associated with greater likelihood that their child will later go on to complete high school and to enter college. Study 2 utilizes a smaller data set of African American children living in relatively economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Detroit who were tracked from the fall of 8th grade to the end of 9th grade.

Results: In Study 1, parental expectations predicted likelihood of both dependent variables (later high school graduation, later college entry). Moreover, parental expectations were the proximal mediator of the effect of parental assets, even controlling for parent income. In study 2, lower neighborhood assets predicted worse grades by the end of 9th grade, controlling for prior grades.

Conclusions: Earlier research demonstrated that a possible self-focused intervention improved the academic outcomes of children from low income contexts and that enrollment in the intervention buffered children from the negative effects of low parent involvement in school. In that study, we speculated that this was because parent involvement in school is a way that parents communicate to their children that school is worth the effort. In the current research, we provide survey-based evidence to support this interpretation, underscoring that low asset parents need assistance in transmitting the message that school is worth the effort to their children. Further, we show that the negative effects of low assets are not only family-driven, but that neighborhood-level assets matter as well.