Student Characteristics And Choice Of High School Remembrance Role

Adolescence, Summer, 1999 by Alyce Holland, Thomas Andre

Father's marital status was weakly related to the separation of groups in Function 3. Individuals who chose the brilliant student remembrance role, as compared with those choosing the popularity role, were slightly more likely to come from intact families. Examination of the univariate means for father's marital status revealed that students who chose to be remembered as most popular were more likely to come from divorced or separated families (23% divorce rate) as compared with students who selected the brilliant student role (14% divorce rate). However, given that the structure coefficient was only 0.235, and that only a small minority of students were not in intact families, additional analysis is warranted.

Variables Unrelated to Remembrance Role

Student employment. Previous research has suggested that there is a relationship between student employment and negative outcomes for high school students (Greenberger & Steinberg, 1986; Marsh, 1991). Marsh argued that adolescents who work longer hours would be less committed to the school culture. Thus, working students would be expected to choose to be remembered as most popular. In contradiction to this hypothesis, there was no evidence that work contributed to the separation of students into the different remembrance roles. Moreover, the failure to find an effect cannot be attributed to limited scope of student employment, since it ranged from no employment to over 20 hours per week.

School size. Somewhat surprisingly, school size did not relate strongly to the separation of students into remembrance role groups. School size has been found to be an important variable in terms of extracurricular participation rates, both for sports and social activities (Barker & Gump, 1964; Holland & Andre, 1987). In the present study, school size contributed somewhat to the discrimination of students wanting to be remembered as brilliant students from students wanting to be remembered as most popular or leaders in activities (Function 3). To a limited extent, students from smaller schools were less likely to choose remembrance as brilliant students. Given that smaller school size is related to higher participation rates and that both sport and social activity participation were very important for classifying students, it may be that the effect of school size was mediated by the participation variables.

Parental variables. Parental variables, as measured in this study, also did not fare well in helping to describe students in the four remembrance role groups. Only mother's educational level contributed to the discrimination functions in any substantial way. Parental variables, such as socioeconomic status (Holland & Andre, 1987), have been shown to be related to participation rates. Again, it may be the case that the effects of parental variables on remembrance role were medicated by the participation variables.

Limitations of the Present Study and Directions for Future Research

While the present study identified a number of variables that are related to adolescent remembrance role choice, their discriminating power was moderate. Clearly, further analyses are necessary to identify additional variables that relate to the selection of remembrance role.