Family Decision Making and Academic Performance in a Diverse High School Population

This article reports the relation betweenfamily decision-making behaviors and academic performance as measured by student effort and grades among a sample of youths from diverse family structures and socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Youths and a subset of their parents reported on how families made decisions on adolescent issues. Granting adolescents too-early autonomy in decision making was associated with lower levels of effort and lower grades, while joint decision making was associated with more effort and higher grades for youth of both sexes, regardless of ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Parents and youths had quite different perceptions of their roles in family decision making; greater disagreement was associated with lower school grades. The occasional departures from the general findings are explained in terms of the cognitive interpretations that shape youths'perceptions.