Giving up when facing injustice? Economic deprivation and school disengagement

Although the enduring social inequality in educational attainment is well-established, research remains inconclusive regarding the impact of economic disadvantage on studentsU+2019 behavioural, emotional, and cognitive disengagement from school. Research into the role of schoolsU+2019 socioeconomic composition in behavioural disengagement is inconclusive too, while school-level determinants of emotional and cognitive disengagement are scantly investigated. A distinction is needed between objective measures of disadvantage U+2013 such as social class defined by educational level, occupation, or income U+2013 and subjective measures U+2013 individualsU+2019 feelings of relative deprivation. The main theories assuming a relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and disengagement U+2013 anomy, resistance and subcultural theory U+2013 suppose that relative deprivation, rather than an objective situation of disadvantage, leads to disengagement. However, most previous research relating socioeconomic indices to disengagement uses objective measures. The current study investigates the relationship between objective and subjective indicators of economic deprivation and behavioural, cognitive, and emotional disengagement. We focus on objective and subjective indicators of deprivation at the student level (parental unemployment and the perception of financial problems at home) and the school level (the proportion of students with unemployed parents and the culture of economic deprivation, that is, the shared feeling among students that their parents have financial problems). Results of stepwise multilevel analyses (HLM7) on data of 2354 students in 30 secondary schools in Ghent (Flanders), part of the baseline survey of the International Study of City Youth (ISCY) collected in 2013-2014, show that students who perceive economic deprivation at home are more likely to disengage behaviourally, emotionally, and cognitively from school. We found no relationship between objective economic deprivation at the individual level and any of the dimensions of disengagement. As for school-level determinants, subjective indicators seemed more important than objective indicators.

Jaar van publicatie:2016