Parental Encouragement, Occupation, Education and Family Size: Artifactual or Independent Determinants of Adolescent Educational Expectations?

Studies of adolescent career orientations provide consistent support for the propositions that educational expectations vary positively with the level of parental occupation and education, the frequency of parental educational encouragement, and negatively with family size. Since each of these four variables is intercorrelated it is possible that one or more of the zero-order associations may be totally or partially artifactual in nature. The use of Rosenberg's test factor standardization technique to generate third-order partials on survey data collected from 2,852 urban high school sophomore males indicates that this is not the case. From the analysis a provisional causal model is constructed. The roles of parental encouragement and of family size in the model receive particular attention.