Abstract
Adolescents with low family socioeconomic status (SES) often have lower academic achievement than their peers with high family SES. However, less is known about the personal buffering mechanisms on the relationship between low family SES and academic achievement for youth. To address adolescents’ academic achievement gap related to family SES, this study aimed to test whether family SES predicted adolescents’ academic achievement and whether adolescents’ subjective social mobility and attention moderated this relationship with longitudinal data. Valid participants included 827 adolescents (Mage = 12.30 years, range: 11–14 years, SD = 0.87, and 40.99% girls) from five township public schools in China. The results showed that family SES (comprising parents’ education, parents’ occupation, and family income) was positively correlated with adolescents’ academic achievement (i.e., Chinese and math) when controlling for prior academic achievement. The positive associations between family SES and both Chinese and math achievement 9 months later were nonsignificant for adolescents with higher levels of subjective social mobility. In addition, the positive effect of family SES on Chinese achievement 9 months later was nonsignificant among adolescents with higher levels of attention. In conclusion, low family SES impairs adolescents’ Chinese and math achievement, high levels of adolescents’ subjective social mobility can buffer the adverse effects of low family SES on both Chinese and math achievement, and high levels of adolescents’ attention can buffer the adverse effects of family SES on Chinese achievement but not on math achievement. These findings may emphasize the significance of developing differential interventions aimed at specific subject achievement for adolescents with low family SES.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to all the adolescents, parents and teachers who participated in or contributed to this study. The authors thank all the assistant researchers who were involved in the data collection. The authors thank all the administrators of each school who helped arrange the investigation of this study.
Authors’ Contributions
FZ conceived of the study, including study questions, study design, data analyses, data curation, and result interpretation, and drafted the manuscript; YJ participated in the study design, edited the draft and provided feedback on the full draft; HM participated in the study design and edited the results section; CYY participated in the study design, and reviewed the full draft; SLH helped draft the manuscript, reviewed the full draft, administered the project and provided resources and supervision. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
This study was supported by the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Science Research Project (18YJA190003); Youth Scholars Program of Beijing Normal University.
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The datasets analyzed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
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Zhang, F., Jiang, Y., Ming, H. et al. Family Socioeconomic Status and Adolescents’ Academic Achievement: The Moderating Roles of Subjective Social Mobility and Attention. J Youth Adolescence 49, 1821–1834 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01287-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01287-x