The predictive power of social support's sources and types for school engagement

Abstract

Social support has been found to play a key role in certain adolescent school behaviours and it is widely accepted that it fosters school engagement. On the contrary, more recent theoretical contributions regarding the principal sources and types of social support during adolescence suggest that this relationship may vary. To respond to this gap in the research the aim of the present study is to determine the predictive power of social support for school engagement (behavioural, emotional and cognitive) in accordance with the source (family, friends, and teachers) and type (emotional, material and informational) of the support provided to determine the most influential ones and to test through a structural model the combined statistical effect of both perspectives. Participants were 323 compulsory secondary school students from the Basque Autonomous Community, aged between 13 and 18 years (M = 14.41, SD = 1.18), being 40% boys and 60% girls. Participants completed two questionnaires, one measuring perceived social support and one measuring school engagement. The results of the present study show that perceived support from all sources and all types of support predict at least one of the three dimensions of school engagement. The results also indicate that support from teachers and emotional support were the source and type of support (respectively) that most strongly predicted school engagement, whose combined effect has been tested using SEM methodology. These findings may be particularly useful for designing future educational intervention programmes that seek to foster school engagement through social support. For example, intervention designs focusing on encouraging certain changes in teachers’ practice to foster a learning experience based on closer relations characterised by trust and recognition are suggested.