The Vital Agenda for Research on Extracurricular Influences: A Reply to Holland and Andre

On the whole, studies of extracurricular participation in secondary school have been surprisingly bereft of a conceptual framework, rife with methodological problems, and prone to include overstatements or “overinterpretations” of findings. Holland and Andre’s (1988) recent review of this literature points out these shortcomings, but provides an unduly beneficent or optimistic summary of many studies and stops short of the decisive directives needed to yield more enlightening studies. I emphasize the compelling needs to derive appropriate conceptual/theoretical frameworks, to expand samples and methods, to focus more on processes of influence than on differences in outcomes between participants and nonparticipants, and to study extracurricular influences within the broader context of high school students’ lives.