Family Status, Socialization, and Student Politics: A Multivariate Analysis

Instead of bivariate analyses which have been employed in the past to explain the origins of student politics, a multivariate model appears better suited to test the theoretical assumptions available for verification. A sample of 1,246 college students representing both flanks of the campus ideological spectrum has been surveyed from ten universities and from two national conventions. Gamma and path-analysis techniques were used to test the relationship among selected aspects of family status, socialization, and student politics. While both techniques detected family politics to be the strongest predictor of student politics, with offspring closely following the political views of their parents, path analysis revealed that: between 20 and 40 percent of the total variance in the direction of student politics could be explained by the variables in our model; ethnicity was deleted from the model due to its high interrelationship with family politics and parents' religion; both social class and family politics directly affected student politics but had no effect on socialization; and religion alone was able to explain direction of student politics directly and sequentially through family political argumentation.