In plain language
What matters more for how teenagers feel about school and how well they think they are doing academically: their personality, or how their parents treat them? This study asked that question directly, because although both factors had been studied separately, no research had looked at their joint effects on school attitudes and self-rated academic performance in young people.
The researchers surveyed 115 Year 10 students (aged 14–16) from two Australian high schools. Students completed measures of major personality dimensions—extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism (a trait involving toughmindedness and hostility), agreeableness, and conscientiousness—along with the Parental Bonding Instrument, which captures how caring and how overprotective they perceived each parent to be. They also rated their attitudes to school (for example, whether school is boring, whether they skip classes) and their academic performance.
Personality clearly won. Students low in psychoticism and high in conscientiousness—organised, persistent, reliable—had more positive attitudes to school and rated their academic performance higher. Parental care and overprotection, by contrast, were only weakly related to these outcomes; father care predicted school attitudes but nothing predicted academic performance among the parenting variables. The findings suggest that a young person's characteristic ways of behaving and working are central to their day-to-day functioning at school.
Key findings
- Low psychoticism and high conscientiousness were consistent, significant predictors of both positive attitudes to school and higher self-rated academic performance.
- Psychoticism explained the largest portion of unique variance in school attitudes (14.2%), followed by conscientiousness (9.2%), father care (6.5%), and extraversion (5.9%).
- Self-rated academic performance was best predicted by conscientiousness (7.8% of unique variance) followed by psychoticism (5.3%).
- Introversion (rather than extraversion) made a unique contribution to positive school attitudes, consistent with the idea that lively, sensation-seeking behaviour fits poorly with school regimes.
- Parental bonding variables (care and overprotection) were only weakly related to outcomes; none of the parenting measures significantly predicted self-rated academic performance.
- Agreeableness correlated with school attitudes but did not make a significant unique contribution, replicating earlier findings that agreeableness is not particularly useful for predicting academic outcomes.
How to cite
APA
Heaven, P. C. L., Mak, A., Barry, J., & Ciarrochi, J. (2002). Personality and family influences on adolescent attitudes to school and self-rated academic performance. Personality and Individual Differences, 32(3), 453–462. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00041-1
BibTeX
@article{heaven2002personality,
author = {Heaven, Patrick C. L. and Mak, Anita and Barry, Jocelyn and Ciarrochi, Joseph},
title = {Personality and family influences on adolescent attitudes to school and self-rated academic performance},
journal = {Personality and Individual Differences},
year = {2002},
volume = {32},
number = {3},
pages = {453--462},
doi = {10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00041-1}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.