ABSTRACT
Building on the assumption that individual characteristics, classified here as demographic variables, affect adjustment by their influence on coping behaviour, as represented by a person’s personality and general orientation, we will now start developing our models of student adjustment to specific situations, as seen through their own eyes and through the eyes of others. The effects of the social situations in which our children operate, such as the family, the friendship network, and the general cultural milieu will be covered in succeeding chapters. Here we will be concerned with the effects of demographic characteristics on adjustment as mediated by the personality and meaning of school attributes. Using the overall strategy spelled out in Chapter 2, regression equations for outcome measures and the coping style mediators were developed by regressing each on their specific significant demographic antecedents, defined as those with significant zero-order correlations. If an antecedent had both a direct and an indirect (mediated) effect on the outcome variable, that is, contributed significantly, with a beta weight>.10, to both scores, the measure and its beta are shaded in the diagram for both. Models in this book are based on the total sample (minimum n=1686, see Table 2.1) with the effects of culture partialled out by entering dummy variables for six of the seven samples used in this study. The dummy variable representing the culture omitted (to avoid singularity) from the regression run was the one showing a very low zero-order correlation with the dependent variable. This procedure allows us to show, for each adjustment and mediating variable, the resulting beta-coefficients associated with each substantive variables when taken in the context of the other variables and with cultural differences discounted. When the beta weight is multiplied by the zeroorder correlation (in brackets), the amount of the adjustment variance attributable to that particular variable is ascertained. The adjustment measure’s R2 represents the summed variance of all the model predictors for that outcome. As cultural differences have been partialled out, this describes the similarities across cultures of predictors of each adjustment and coping style score. We will look at cultural differences in Chapter 8.
