"Significant Others, the Self-Reflexive Act and the Attitude Formation Process": A Reinterpretation

The Woelfel-Haller (1971) model of the influence of significant others on the formation of educational and occupational aspirations is identified and its parameters are correctly estimated on the basis of their reported data on 100 Wisconsin high school seniors. Because of certain inadequacies revealed by the parameter estimates, the model is respecified by postulating underlying status expectations and ambition factors to account for the correlations among observed indicators, thus corroborating previously postulated factor interpretations of aspirations variables. It is found that fathers' occupational prestige, student's measured mental ability, and significant others' status expectations do not fully explain the relationship of the student's ambition to his academic performance; a standardized regression coefficient of about 0.85 runs from student's ambition to academic performance, and one of about 0.2 runs in the opposite direction. The validity of these parameter estimates is negatively affected by the underidentification of additional theoretically relevant relationships in the model as well as by any sampling and measurement errors which may exist in the data.