Seeing the Destination but Not the Path: Effects of Socioeconomic Disadvantage On School-Focused Possible Self Content and Linked Behavioral Strategies

Background and Purpose: Much research supports a link between neighborhood and family SES and youth academic achievement (e.g. Orfield, 2004, 2006), but the psychological pathways by which SES affects performance are unclear. Although some researchers have suggested that lowered aspirations can explain the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and school failure, we suspect that children from low-SES backgrounds do in fact have future images, or possible identities, focused on academic success. Rather, we propose that family and neighborhood economic disadvantage are likely to cloud the path to school success, such that these students, especially boys, are less likely to have strategies for reaching their academic possible identities.

Methods: We used a sample of eighth-graders (African-American n=117, European-American n=161, Other n=6; n=138 male, n=146 female) from primarily low-income communities in four states collected by the Fast Track Project (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1992). An open-ended possible self and strategy measure (Oyserman, et al., 2002) was administered in participants' homes by project staff. A neighborhood disadvantage index consisting of poverty, unemployment, public assistance, and female-headed households was created using data obtained from the 2000 Census. Data were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling to accommodate the multilevel structure of the data and to examine the extent to which child-level (gender, race, parental SES, GPA) and neighborhood-level variables predict differences in salience of school-focused possible identities and linked behavioral strategies.

Results: We first examined the effects of family and neighborhood disadvantage on the salience of school-focused possible identities, and found a significant main effect of neighborhood disadvantage (NDI â=0.26, SE=0.09, p<.01). Youth living in neighborhoods with greater economic disadvantage were more likely to have school-focused possible identities. Next, we examined the effects of socioeconomic deprivation on the number of strategies youth generated, controlling for the salience of school-focused possible identities. Higher family SES children had more school-focused strategies (â=0.16, SE=0.06, p< .01). Boys were less likely to generate strategies than girls (â=-0.24, SE=0.11, p<.05) and there was a significant neighborhood deprivation by gender interaction (â=-0.21, SE=0.10, p=.05), such that boys living in more economically disadvantaged neighborhoods had fewer strategies.

Conclusions and Implications: We found that children in more disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to have school-focused possible identities, implying that educational attainment was at least as salient for these children as for others in the sample. However, we also found that both family and (for boys) neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation predicted having fewer strategies, implying that low SES undermines children's ability to clearly see the path toward their school-focused aspirations. In light of prior work showing that low-income children with school-focused possible identities paired with strategies perform better in school (for a review, Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006), these results contribute to explaining the aspiration-attainment gap among low-income children (Mello, 2009). Our findings counter a common assumption that low-income students require help in raising their expectations and rather suggest that they would be better served by interventions focused on generating concrete behavioral strategies.