Adolescents’ emerging habitus: the role of early parental expectations and practices

Abstract

This study makes two contributions to the literature. First, it bridges the sociological discussion of social class habitus with psychological notions of adolescents’ educational expectations, locus of control, and self-concepts. Second, it empirically examines the relationships between early employed parental practices and expectations and adolescents’ dispositions using a recently available wave of data from a nationally representative sample of US students. The findings reveal that students from higher socioeconomic status families had more positive general and area-specific self-concepts, higher educational expectations, higher internal locus of control, and higher academic achievement, and higher parental educational expectations were positively associated with all studied outcomes. The findings provide only partial support for the effects of early parental practices and highlight the role of gender and race/ethnicity in shaping adolescents’ habitus.

Keywords:

• habitus
• parental practices
• educational expectations

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Katherine Reed for her insightful comments and her help with the manuscript preparation. The author also would like to acknowledge helpful feedback and enthusiasm of the panelists of the Sociology of Education roundtable session during the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 2011, where an early version of the paper was presented.

Notes

1. The maximum amount of missing data on any of the variables is 15%. With a small amount of missing data, the listwise deletion estimates will be virtually identical to those produced by multiple imputation techniques (Amato et al. 2003). A comparison between the full and analytical sample reveals that the latter includes slightly more White students, students from higher socioeconomic status families, and students raised by two married biological parents.