Adolescent Attachment, Peer Relationships, and School ...
Running Head: ADOLESCENT ATTACHMENT
Adolescent Attachment, Peer Relationships, and School Success:
Predictor, Mediator, and Moderator Relations
Jill Carlivati
Distinguished Majors Thesis
University of Virginia
April, 2001
Advisor: Dr. Joseph P. Allen
Second Reader: Dr. Nancy S. Weinfield
Acknowledgements
Many individuals helped make the writing of my thesis a rewarding learning experience. Through their unselfish support, I met each project challenge confidently as I gained new insights into both adolescent development and research methodology.
I thank Dr. Joseph P. Allen not only for his ongoing guidance with the project, but also for his leadership with the Virginia Study of Teens and Families, which provided the framework for my study. My frequent discussions with Dr. Allen on underlying theory and project design proved invaluable. His direction and support provided clarity, discipline, and meaning to my work.
Similarly, I express deep appreciation to Dr. Nancy S. Weinfield, not only for serving as my second reader, but also for her instruction on the nature of attachment. Her expertise in this area, as well as her willingness to share this knowledge, enhanced my understanding of adolescent attachment and offered me new insights.
Additionally, I extend a sincere thank-you to Heather Tencer for serving as my graduate advisor. Her assistance with data analysis and the observations she made on early versions of the paper were particularly valuable.
Other members of Dr. Allen’s lab, particularly Penny Marsh, Felicia Hall, and Maryfrances Porter were also very helpful to me as I pursued my work. I sincerely appreciate their support with SAS programming and school data analysis.
Finally, to my family, thank you for first teaching me the importance of parent-child relationships.
Abstract
Because of the influences of school success on diverse areas of development and the empirically suggested connections among adolescent attachment, peer relations, and academic factors, the relationships among these constructs were investigated. A sample of 176 ninth and tenth graders at risk for academic difficulties participated in the study. Independent predictive links between attachment and school factors, attachment and peer factors, and peer and school factors were analyzed. The possibility of peer factors serving as a mediator of the relation between attachment and school factors was considered. Finally, interactions between attachment and peer factors in predicting school satisfaction and performance were examined. Independent links among the three constructs, as well as some mediated and moderated effects of peer relationships, were supported. Results suggest that a model considering both attachment and peer relationship factors may best explain teenagers’ satisfaction with school and performance in the academic environment.
Adolescent Attachment, Peer Relationships, and School Success:
Predictor, Mediator, and Moderator Relations
Current research suggests that school performance correlates with quality of one’s interpersonal relationships and additional developmental outcomes. Academic failure, as assessed by the frequency of problems with peers and difficulty with school work, has a great impact on relationships in the home, as students who have had a bad day at school are more likely to display aversive behavior towards their parents that evening (Repetti, 1996). Performance in the classroom can influence self-perceptions, as teacher-rated work and social patterns predict self-esteem, while grades in a particular subject can influence students’ self-esteem relating to that given subject (Hoge, Smit, & Hanson, 1990).
In addition to relationships in the home and one’s self-view, experiences in the school environment can affect one’s success in society. The absence of a completed high school or college education can affect job prospects. Approximately half of the American population does not have a college education, and national support, especially in the job market, remains limited for those without high school diplomas. Furthermore, people without college degrees have significantly lower income than college graduates, and this monetary disparity is increasing; on average, a high school graduate of the late 1980s has only one third of the adjusted income of a high school graduate of the 1970s. These differences in income affect many facets of individuals’ lives, as adolescents who have less optimistic job prospects due to a lack of schooling are likely to compensate for their lessened income by delaying marriage and families (William T. Grant Foundation, 1988).
Poor school performance also has consequences on physical health. Academic achievement has been shown to influence the association between the parent-child relationship and a teenager’s involvement in a pregnancy (Scaramell, Conger, Simons, & Whitbeck, 1998). Among females, lower expectations for academic success are found to influence the progression from experimental to regular cigarette smoking (Chassin, Presson, Sherman, Montello, & McGrew, 1986).
Therefore, many aspects of development during the adolescent years are greatly shaped by success in the school environment. As teenagers progress through middle and high school, their lives are influenced by both their perceptions of their school performance and their actual academic achievement. When an adolescent receives lows grades, is uncommitted to class work, reacts negatively to teachers, and interacts poorly with peers, a large portion of their day is spent in an environment in which they feel ambivalent at best, and long lasting influences on development are likely.
Because of the influences of school performance on psychological and biological development and the influences of school attrition on job and family prospects, it is important to investigate predictors of adolescents’ negative scholastic performance. Hopefully, such work will allow for the creation of intervention measures that will prevent teenagers from following a path to school failure and general maladjustment during their teenage years and beyond.
A report by the William T. Grant Foundation (1988) suggests that programs designed to produce school success will likely fail unless implemented along with family and community measures. Without the support of those around a child, motivation to perform well in school, as well as positive reinforcement to do so, may be absent. In particular, the adult-child, or more specifically the parent-child, relationship must be targeted to successfully advance academically at-risk teenagers (William T. Grant Foundation, 1988). One aspect of the parent-child relationship that has a great impact on numerous areas of children’s functioning, which would therefore be of interest when studying predictors of poor school adjustment, is attachment. That is, as attachment has been shown to relate to peer relationships and peer competence across developmental periods (Elicker, Englund, & Sroufe, 1992), popularity (DeMulder, Denham, Schmidt, & Mitchell, 2000), aggression (Cohn, 1990; DeMulder et al., 2000), self-esteem (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), and the emergence of depression during adolescence (Nada Raja, McGee, & Stanton, 1992), there is the possibility that attachment may also be related to academic functioning.
Attachment is a class of social behavior. Bowlby (1969) characterized attachment early in development by a child’s proximity seeking behavior. At about four months of age, a secure infant will begin to respond differentially towards adults, preferring the mother, who serves as the attachment figure. Beginning around age three, a securely attached child may begin to feel comfortable with teachers or relatives, who serve as “subordinate attachment figures,” as the secure child is confident that he or she may resume contact with the mother as necessary (Bowlby, 1969). As they grow older, securely attached children continue to explore the world under the care of responsive, sensitive parents, from whom they seek comfort when distressed (Bowlby, 1969). Bowlby’s theory on attachment is concurrent with the view of attachment as an organizational construct, an assertion that early learning experiences of the infant within the context of the parent-caregiver relationship will continue to influence development outside of this specific relationship (Sroufe & Waters, 1977).
Variations in psychological adjustment which can be attributed to differences in attachment security may be reflections of the varying approaches taken by individuals of different attachments when faced with distress cues (Kobak & Cole, 1994). Children who have insecure attachment relationships with their caregivers feel much less confidence in the availability and helpfulness of their parents when in distress (Bowlby, 1969). Insecurely attached children will perceive others as unreliable or unnecessary sources of comfort (Bowlby, 1973). These children often have problems in diverse areas of development, exhibiting both emotional distress and often disturbances in personality, both of which are less likely to be found in securely attached children due to their more positive representations of interpersonal interactions (Bowlby, 1977).
Furthermore, into the teenage years attachment continues to influence individuals’ perceptions of others and their actual relationships. Insecure attachment organizations during the teenage years may result in difficulties in interactions with others, as well as perceptions of others, resulting in social problems throughout later life (Allen et al., 1998; Cassidy, Kirsh, Scolton, & Parke, 1996; Dodge, 1993; Slough & Greenberg, 1990). Insecure adolescents lack coherence in thinking about attachment-related experiences and have difficulty processing elements of their peer relationships (Allen & Land, 1999). Hence, attachment theory leads to the conclusion that there is a causal relationship between formative experiences with parents and one’s ability to form and maintain later positive relationships with others (Bowlby, 1989), an assertion supported by current research.
Armsden and Greenberg (1987) state that attachment relationships may buffer children from harmful outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and emotional distress, all of which may occur during times of life turmoil. This buffering hypothesis is especially relevant to attachment during the teenage years, as early adolescence is inherently a period of transition (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987). Teenagers’ moodiness, the often changing nature of adolescent relationships, and teenagers’ strives for independence from their parents may make adolescence a period of continual activation of the attachment system (Allen & Land, 1999). Therefore, current research suggests that both attachment organization and current attachment relationships continue to be of great importance during adolescence, even though this notion has been somewhat counterbalanced by Bowlby’s (1969) earlier view of adolescent attachment, which argues that during adolescence, parent-child attachment often becomes weaker.
Allen and Land (1999) suggest that although teenagers’ behavior often appears to distance adolescents from attachment figures, this observation can be explained by taking into account developmental changes of the period as well as the acknowledgement that autonomy seeking behaviors may hinder the recognition of attachment relationships. As adolescence is a period of change, many teenagers at this stage of life will begin to take on the role of a caregiver for others, in some cases peers, within attachment relationships (Bowlby, 1969). This serves as evidence that the individual’s role in the attachment relationship during adolescence often extends beyond a receiver of parental care (Allen & Land, 1999). In fact it may be necessary for teenagers to seek emotional distance from their caregivers, allowing their newly attained cognitive processes the freedom to analyze their previous attachment relationships and to resolve prior relationship issues before these severely hinder peer relationships (Allen & Land, 1999). However, it is important to note that the attachment relationship formed with a parent or caregiver is unique, and cannot be substituted by another close relationship, such as that with a sibling (East & Rook, 1992) or a peer. Hence, it would not be surprising that because of the continued role of attachment in development, attachment security during the teenage years may predict various peer and school outcomes, two of the major developmental focuses of adolescence.
It is important to note that attachment during adolescence cannot be defined in the same way as Bowlby’s construct of attachment during early childhood. Following childhood, security appears to shift from a quality of an attachment relationship to a description of one’s attachment organization, a reflection of one’s ease with the integration of attachment information gathered from the individual’s relationship history (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). Secure adolescents have secure internal working models, which are used to make inferences about social relationships. Internal working models, which are the self’s initially conscious and later unconscious mental representational models of the self and others, are greatly influenced by experiences with one’s attachment figures. Early models of attachment relationships take into account past experiences a child has had with caregivers, and reflect their caregivers’ quality of response (Main et al., 1985). Although internal working models are present at a young age and are important in an infant’s perception of their role in their relationship with a caregiver (Allen & Land, 1999), some argue that it is only as cognitive development proceeds that children of different security backgrounds will exhibit different internal working models (Main et al., 1985).
With the onset of adolescence, individuals have reached a level of cognitive development advanced enough that they may generalize from their past relationships and use abstract thinking processes to allow one model of attachment organization to emerge from their past experiences (Allen & Land, 1999). The internal working model comes to reflect an adolescent’s state of mind regarding attachment and interpersonal relationships, presumably allowing one’s expectations of the availability of others to remain fairly constant throughout life (Bowlby, 1973). Hence, adolescent attachment security becomes a reflection of a teenager’s integrated view of relationships, rather than simply a characteristic of the adolescent’s relationship with a parent.
It follows that because relationships, both with peers and teachers, should contribute to adolescents’ satisfaction with and performance in school, attachment security may be important in explaining scholastic outcomes during the teenage years. In fact, there are strong correlations of attachment with both internalizing and externalizing problems throughout development, especially during adolescence (Allen, Moore, Kuperminc, & Bell, 1998), and these problems not surprisingly would affect one’s success and happiness in school. Therefore, it is logical to look to attachment both to predict teenagers’ social adjustment in the school environment and to interact with peer relationship factors to produce varying school outcomes. Consequently, attachment and peer relationships in the classroom may together explain adolescents’ perceived and actual academic problems, as insecure teenagers may be overly sensitive to interpersonal difficulties, neglecting their interactions with others and their learning in the scholastic setting.
Before it is possible to analyze the connections between attachment and school performance in adolescence, it is necessary to further clarify the construct of adolescent attachment and how this construct affects teenagers in the classroom environment. As adolescents transition to the formal operations stage of cognitive development, individuals may begin to analyze all of their relationships (for example, those with peers or teachers) and may even alter their internal working models (Allen & Land, 1999; Bowlby, 1988; Main et al., 1985). Allen and Land (1999) have offered support to this assertion by explaining that adolescents’ newly acquired ability to consider their prior attachment relationships from the perspective of the caregiver may serve to allow them to later take on this role in their relationships with peers. Furthermore, as adolescents begin to analyze past relationships, their strategy employed in approaching attachment memories, emotions, and relationships becomes crucially important (Allen & Land, 1999). Attachment during the teenage years then becomes one’s organization and processing of attachment-related thoughts, feelings, and emotions, rather than a specific categorization of a given relationship (for example, having a secure attachment relationship with one’s teacher) as in infancy. However, attachment during adolescence continues to relate to the manner in which individuals approach social environments such as the classroom, as the individual’s attachment organization still affects one’s relationships with others.
Although much support is offered for a change in the definition of attachment beginning in adolescence, this is a topic of debate. Bowlby (1969) has stipulated that the major transition of this period may be a change in the people to whom attachment behavior is directed. For instance, teenagers may be attached to their friends and their teachers. That is, Bowlby (1989) has argued that people of all ages are best adjusted when they have confidence in the availability of an attachment figure. Individuals should continue to seek out such figures throughout life during times of distress (Allen & Land, 1999). A teenager with an insecure attachment will gravitate towards insecure peers, likely enhancing the negative effects of such attachments for both individuals. This effect may occur solely in the immediate context of the relationship (for example, negative functioning in school if this is the environment where the peers interact) as would be expected by Bowlby’s attachment theory, or may have more overarching effects for all of a teenager’s relationships.
Recent research now suggests, however, that the early view of adolescent attachment as differing from attachment in early childhood only in whom the behavior is directed towards is incorrect. Kobak and Sceery’s (1988) study, which relied on adolescents’ newly acquired ability to integrate attachment histories to form a working model of the parent-child relationship, found that there is a coherence of attachment organization during late adolescence. Kobak and Sceery (1988) concluded that distress activates the attachment system, with the relative coherence of working models influencing the perceptions of others during distressing events. The higher levels of familial support of secure adolescents should result in perceptions of availability of attachment figures during times of distress, whereas the higher levels of anxiety found in preoccupied individuals should lead to unhealthy dependency in relationships and the inability to calm distress (Kobak & Sceery, 1988). Therefore, this research suggests that adolescent attachment organization differs from attachment during infancy, as one’s personal organization of attachment relationships in general becomes the crucial defining aspect of attachment.
It is possible that attachment organization is only meaningful in the context of an attachment relationship (Allen & Land, 1999), whether it is with parents or possibly with peers and teachers. However, researchers currently define adolescent attachment as an internal organization, a dramatically different view than attachment as an external organization as it is during the early years of life. This present view of adolescent attachment is supported by theory on the purpose of attachment during adulthood. That is, late in life attachment is primarily utilized as a means of dealing with intense affect, and therefore should become a characteristic of the individual rather than a construct dependent upon a relationship with a caregiver (Allen & Land, 1999). Organization of attachment thus appears to be the most theoretically useful and empirically supported way in which to define adolescent attachment.
As this view of adolescent attachment organization suggests that attachment is a critical contributor to internal working models of relationships, it follows that attachment will have implications for interpersonal interactions in the school environment. When adolescents exhibit coherence in speaking about and reflecting upon attachment experiences, these teenagers’ secure attachment organizations should allow for similarly coherent views on peer relationships (Allen & Land, 1999). Insecurity should lead to less coherence in one’s thoughts on peer relationships. These deficiencies in the manner in which peer relationships are perceived will produce poor relationships with others. In the school environment, a lack of positive peer relationships should drastically impact academic performance, as children are distracted from their studies by interpersonal problems.
An increasing body of research suggests that parental relationship factors are correlated with problems in the school setting. At age four, children who display high levels of mother-child affect and intimacy are rated by teachers as having greater academic competency, better work habits, and fewer behavior problems in the classroom. Furthermore, mother-child dyads exhibiting more positive maternal qualities of interaction have children with fewer behavior problems and preferred work habits (Pianta, Nimetz, & Bennett, 1997). The effects that parents have on school performance may also be evident on a day-to-day basis; although not necessarily indicative of an insecure attachment relationship, during their late elementary school years, children who report a high level of parental aversive behavior on one day will have increased peer and academic problems in their classroom the following day (Repetti, 1996).
There have also been findings to suggest that the security of the attachment relationship, rather than simply the relationship quality of the parent-child dyad, may correlate with early school success. In preschool, less secure children display greater amounts of aggression and anger towards their teachers (DeMulder et al., 2000), which may impact children’s reception by teachers, motivation to perform well in the classroom, and consequent scholastic performance. Security is likewise shown to affect teachers’ perceptions of children in the classroom, as boys having just completed kindergarten are reported less likable by their teachers if they are insecurely attached to their parents (Cohn, 1990).
As children progress through elementary school, the importance of a secure attachment in contributing to scholastic achievement does not diminish; children at age seven who have secure parental attachments as assessed by responses to separation stories and observations have better cognitive performance, a trend which continues through adolescence (Jacobsen, Edelstein, & Hofmann, 1994). Additionally, secure attachments during late childhood and early adolescence influence school performance, as Jacobsen and Hofmann (1997) have found that securely attached children have higher levels of attention and participation in school, as well as a higher GPAs. Finally, Finnegan, Hodges, and Perry (1996) theorized that school performance might in turn influence security, as disruptive antisocial acts performed in the school environment may cause parental rejection or avoidance in children’s attachment relationships.
Research supports a relationship between attachment and various school performance outcomes. But are there outside factors that could cause the association between attachment and school performance? As peer relationships often occur in the context of the school environment and are often influenced by attachment security, the quality of ties to one’s peers may contribute to the explanation of the relationship between attachment and academic performance. Hence, the connections between attachment and peer relations may merit consideration.
Early in development, the nature of the child-caregiver attachment relationship predicts not how frequently peer interactions are initiated, but rather how peers respond to the initiator; insecurely attached toddlers begin interactions with peers in ways that lower the probability of future positive peer interactions (Fagot, 1997). Less secure preschoolers also display increased aggression and anger towards their peers (DeMulder et al., 2000), which could account for the impact of security on peer relationships. Parental relationship qualities, such as mother-child affect and intimacy, are also correlated with peer social skills in preschoolers (Pianta et al., 1997). Security likewise affects young children’s models of peer behavior; in an investigation of children in kindergarten and first grade, Cassidy, Kirsh, Scolton, and Parke (1996) found that children securely attached to their mothers more often believe that their peers have positive intent in ambiguous situations. Clearly, a young child’s attachment relationship with his or her caregiver has wide ranging implications for social interactions with peers.
Older children’s attachment also has been found to predict peer relationships. Secure attachments may foster social competence during middle childhood (Freitag, Belsky, Grossmann, Grossmann, & Scheuerer-Englisch, 1996), likely impacting a child’s quality and number of friendships; therefore insecurely attached children should have limited access to positive peer social support. Self-reports of security with one’s mother have been shown to relate to fifth graders’ acceptance by their peers and their behavior with friends (Kerns, Cole, & Klepac, 1996), again having implications for the potential formation of positive peer networks during childhood.
Additionally, the security of a child’s parental attachment relationship is related to qualities within individual peer relationships and not simply the social group as a whole. Self-reported security and closeness in friendships correlates with perceived parental attachment (Lieberman, Doyle, & Markiewicz, 1999). Higher peer competence is also reported for secure adolescents (Allen et al., 1998), and during late adolescence, security is correlated with peer reports of hostility and self-reports of social support (Kobak & Sceery, 1988). These studies suggest that peer relationships are affected by the security of attachment throughout development.
Just as children’s attachment may influence peer relationships, peer relationships may in turn have drastic influences on school success. Conflict with kindergarten friends is related to school adjustment problems such as decreased involvement and lower levels of liking school (Ladd, Kochenderfer, & Coleman, 1996). Also in kindergarten, increased classroom participation and achievement is correlated with one’s number of friends and peer acceptance (Ladd, Birch, & Buhs, 1999). Peer acceptance similarly predicts school adjustment in children in the first through third grades (Diehl, Lemerise, Caverly, Ramsay, & Roberts, 1998).
During adolescence the connection between peer relationships and academic performance continues. Acceptance by peers in both the sixth and seventh grades is positively related to the pursuit of prosocial goals and behavior, while negatively related to the pursuit of academic social responsibility goals (Wentzel, 1994). There are some more positive influences of peers on scholastic performance, though, as Berndt and Keefe (1995) have found that children with positive friendship features in the seventh and eighth grades are more involved in school. Those with negative friendship features are highest on self-reported disruption, have the lowest school involvement, and seem to be more affected by these negative features of friendships than their peers are affected by their own positive friendship features (Berndt & Keefe, 1995). Peer relationships also appear to affect discipline-specific academic success; middle and high school students’ English efficacy is related to high perceived peer attachment as measured by the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (Laible, Carlo, & Raffaelli, 2000). Consequently, it may be concluded that school performance during adolescence is connected to aspects of teenagers’ peer relationships and social skills.
Although much research has been conducted on the relationship between attachment and peer relations, as well as each variable’s connection to school performance, the relationships among these three factors have not been thoroughly explored in adolescence. Moreover, the use of a wide range of school adjustment measures, including self-, peer-, and school-reported variables, to assess academic performance in the teenage years has not been employed when investigating connections to both attachment and peer relations. The study of mediators between attachment and school outcomes is lacking; it has been suggested that this relationship could be mediated by a child’s behavioral self-restraint (Feldman & Wentzel, 1990), but the strong correlations between attachment and peer relationships naturally lead one to question if peer relationships are a crucial mediator. Finally, the possibility of peer relationships as a moderator remains to be examined, as it may be the interaction of attachment with peer relations that influences school outcomes.
The current study will aim to clarify the relationships between attachment, peer relations, and school outcomes during adolescence. Specifically, this study will address the following questions:
1. Are both perceptions of attachment and attachment organization related to school performance during adolescence?
2. Do perceptions of attachment and attachment organization predict the quality of adolescents’ peer relationships?
3. Do peer relationships predict school satisfaction and achievement?
4. Is there any evidence of mediated effects of peer relations?
5. Is there an interaction between perceived attachment to parents and to friends in predicting school success?
It is hypothesized that attachment perceptions and organization will correlate with teenagers’ perceptions of their academic environment, as well as their actual success in school. Secure attachment organization is also predicted to correlate with the presence of social support and peer relationships. Positive peer relationship factors are hypothesized to predict greater satisfaction with and performance in school. Although both attachment and peer relationships should independently relate to academic variables, with the most secure adolescents as well as those with reports of social acceptance performing at the highest level in school, academic outcomes will be explained best by a model taking into account both attachment and peer relations.
Method
Participants
One hundred and sixty-six ninth and tenth grade students (89 male, 77 female) participated in this study. Upon entering the study, adolescents ranged in age from 14 to 18.75 years with a mean of 15.9 years (SD = 0.8). The self-identified racial/ethnic background of the sample was 59.6% European-American, 38.6% African-American, and 1.8% other. Thirty percent of adolescents were living with both biological parents. The mean family income was $32,030 with a range from less than $2,500 to greater than $70,000.
Participants were recruited through public school systems serving rural, suburban, and moderately urban areas. Adolescents were selected for inclusion in the study based upon the presence of at least one of four possible academic risk factors: 1) failing a single course for at least a single marking period, 2) any history of grade retention, 3) ten or more absences in one marking period, or 4) any history of school suspension. These broad selection criteria were used to include a wide range of adolescents who could be identified from academic records as having the potential for future academic and social difficulties, including adolescents already experiencing serious difficulties and those who were performing adequately with only occasional, minor problems. As intended, these criteria identified approximately one-half of all ninth and tenth grade students as eligible for the study.
Each teenager was asked to name several friends who knew him or her well to participate in a peer interview. Sixty-one male (47.3%) and sixty-eight female (52.7%) peers were interviewed. The average age of peers participating was 16.4 years (SD = 1.4 years). Seventy-three (56.6%) of the peers were European American, fifty (38.8%) were African American, and six (4.7%) were of another racial background.
Procedure
After adolescents were identified as meeting the criteria of the study, letters explaining the study were sent to the families of each potential participant. Interested families were contacted by phone. If both the teenager and the parent(s) agreed to participate, they were scheduled for two, three-hour sessions. Approximately 50% of the approached families agreed to participate. Families were paid a total of $105 for their participation. Active informed consent was obtained from both adolescents and their parents.
The teenagers participating in the study were asked to provide names of up to five friends who “knew them well” to participate in a peer interview. Up to two of these friends were contacted for an interview. In cases in which data were gathered from two peers, their ratings of the teenager in the study were averaged to create one peer variable. Active consent was obtained from both peers and parents of peers participating in the study. Peers were paid $10 to come in for a one-hour session, during which they completed written questionnaires and used Q-sort techniques to rate the teenager who had nominated them for participation in the study. Data were collected from peers in sessions separate from those of the participating target teenagers. Transportation and childcare were provided for all participants as necessary.
Study participants were assured that all information would be kept confidential. Data were protected by a confidentiality certificate issued by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, which protected information from subpoena by federal, state, and local courts.
Measures
Adult Attachment Interview and Q-Set (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996; Kobak, Cole, Ferenz-Gillies, Fleming, & Gamble, 1993). Researchers administered this structured interview to probe individuals’ descriptions of their childhood relationships with parents, with requests for abstract terms as well as specific supporting memories. For instance, participants were asked to list five words describing their early childhood relationships, and then to describe specific instances that reflected each word. Other questions addressed specific instances of upset, separation, loss, trauma, and rejection. Finally, interviewers asked participants to provide more integrative descriptions of the changes in their relationships with their parents and the current state of these relationships. Each interview consisted of eighteen questions and lasted on average one hour. Slight adaptations to the adult version of the attachment interview were made to make the questions more natural and easily understood by an adolescent population (Ward & Carlson, 1995). All interviews were audiotaped and then transcribed for coding.
The AAI Q-Set (Kobak et al., 1993). This Q-set was designed to resemble the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) Classification System (Main & Goldwyn, in press), while also yielding continuous measures of qualities of attachment organization. The data produced by this system nevertheless can be reduced via an algorithm to classifications that largely agree with three category ratings from the AAI Classification System (Borman-Spurrell, Allen, Hauser, Carter, & Cole-Detke, 1995; Kobak et al., 1993). Each coder using the Q-set method reads an AAI transcript and provides a Q-sort description by using a forced distribution, assigning 100 items into nine categories ranging from most to least characteristic of the interview. All interviews were blindly rated by at least two coders with extensive training in both the Q-sort and Main AAI Classification System.
The Q-sorts were then compared with dimensional prototype sorts for: secure versus anxious interview strategies, reflecting the overall degree of coherence of discourse, the integration of episodic and semantic attachment memories, and a clear objective evaluation of attachment; preoccupied strategies, reflecting either rambling, extensive, but unfocused discourse about attachment experiences, or angry preoccupation with attachment figures; dismissing strategies, reflecting inability or unwillingness to recount attachment experiences, idealization of attachment figures that is discordant with reported experiences, and lack of evidence for valuing attachment; and deactivating versus hyperactivating strategies, representing the overall balance of dismissing and preoccupied styles. Kobak et al. (1993) validated the use of these dimensions, stating that they accurately capture the constructs of the AAI Classification System.
Each participant’s scale score consisted of the correlation of the 100 Q-sort items with each attachment dimension (ranging from –1.00 to 1.00). The Spearman-Brown reliabilities for the final scale scores were .84 for secure, .89 for dismissing, .82 for preoccupied, and .91 for hyperactivating versus deactivating scales. Although this system was designed to yield continuous measures of attachment organizations, rather than replicate classifications from the Main and Goldwyn (in press) system, the current study reduced the scale scores to classifications by using the largest Q-scale score above .20 as the primary classification (Kobak et al., 1993). When scores were compared to a subsample (N=76) of the adolescent AAI’s classified by an independent coder with well-established reliability in classifying AAI’s (U. Wartner), 74% received identical codes (kappa = .56, p < .001), and 84% of scores matched in terms of security versus insecurity (kappa = .68).
Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987). Adolescents’ perceptions of the current degree of trust, communication, and alienation in their relationships with their mothers and peers were assessed using this 25-item inventory. Teenagers rated how true each item was with respect to their mother and their friend(s) on a five-point scale, producing a security composite score. Sample items include: “I trust my mother” (trust), “My mother encourages me to talk about my difficulties” (communication), and “I feel alone or apart when I am with my mother” (alienation). Cronbach alphas measuring internal consistency for the three subscales were .91, .88, and .86, respectively, and .92 for the composite score. This questionnaire has been shown to have good test-retest reliability and has been related to other measures of family environment and teenagers’ psychological functioning (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987).
Adolescent Self-Perception Profile (Harter, 1988). Participating teenagers and their peers completed a modified version of the Adolescent Self-Perception Profile regarding the teenagers’ social acceptance and close friendship competence. For peer reports, the same items were used as in the original measure, but were modified for this peer report measure to allow peer ratings of the adolescent, rather than self-ratings. Teenagers and peers rated how true each item was of the participating teenagers on a four-point scale from “not true at all” to “very true.” Examples of items from the scales include: “Some people are popular with others their age, but other people are not very popular” (social acceptance) and “Some people do not have a really close friend to share things with, but other people do have a close friend to share things with” (close friendship).
The Adolescent Self-Perception Profile was also used to measure participating teenagers’ scholastic competence. Only peers’ reports were used for this scale. As with the social acceptance and close friendship scales, peers were asked to rate how true the items were of their friend. An example of an item from this scale is “Some people do very well at their class work.”
For the peer reports of teenagers with more than one friend participating as their peer in the study, scores from the two peers who rated the teenager were averaged to create a single rating for each scale. The untrained adolescent raters produced ratings that correlated with each other surprisingly well (Spearman-Brown r = 0.63), and the resulting scale had good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.84).
Annual Weighted GPA. Scholastic records were obtained from the participating teenagers’ schools. Each student’s grade point average for the full year was computed, adjusting for any applied/special or advanced/honors courses the participants were taking. Advanced/honors courses were awarded an extra point in the GPA computation, whereas applied/special courses were given a half of a point deduction.
Grades were also adjusted so that the number of credits awarded by the school for each course (.5, 1) was taken into consideration. All classes, not simply the “core” classes of English, science, social studies, and math, were included in the GPA computation.
School Risk. A summary school risk variable was created to account for disciplinary action taken against participating teenagers. To form the variable, the number of times the teenager had been suspended, the number of times the teenager had been expelled, and whether or not the teenager had dropped out of school were taken into account. This information was obtained directly from the teenagers’ schools. The categorical school risk variable ranged from zero (low school risk) to five (high school risk). For a teenager to receive a score of zero on the school risk variable, he or she must have never been suspended. School risk values of one to four were received by teenagers with varying numbers of suspensions, with level one teenagers being suspended one or two times, level two teenagers suspended three to five times, level three teenagers suspended six to ten times, and level four teenagers suspended eleven or more times. A level five school risk was assigned to teenagers who had been expelled from school at any point during their education or had dropped out of school.
Total Attachment to School. A measure of attitudes towards school was adopted from the Quality of School Life Scale (QSL) by Epstein and McPartland (1976/1978) and administered to the participating teenagers. The questionnaire was composed of twenty-six questions related to the adolescent’s experiences at his or her current or most recent school. Questions one to fourteen were true/false questions, questions fifteen to twenty-two were multiple choice questions, and numbers twenty-three to twenty-six included statements rated on a Likert scale. The multiple choice and Likert scale questions were rescaled to dichotomous scores.
Each question loaded on one of three subscales based on the three dimensions of the quality of school life. The satisfaction with school scale examined students’ general reactions to school, the commitment to class work scale measured students’ level of interest in their schoolwork, and the reactions to teachers scale had students evaluate their academic and personal interactions with teachers. Each subscale’s score was the mean of the subscale items times the number of items in the scale. No more than one of the five items of the satisfaction with school scale could be missing in order to compute a participant’s score on this scale. Up to three of the eleven items on the commitment to class work scale and up to three of the ten items on the reactions to teachers scale could be missing to compute an individual’s scores on these scales. To obtain one measure of attachment to school, all three scales were combined by taking the mean of the responses to all twenty-six questions and multiplying by twenty-six. No more than four items could be missing to compute this rating of total attachment to school.
Results
Preliminary Analyses
Demographic factors. Means and standard deviations of all demographic factors are presented in Table 1. Correlations were run between predictor variables and the outcome variables for the full sample (Tables 2, 3, and 4).
Table 1
Demographic variables for target teenagers and peers
| |Teenagers |Peers |
|Age (in years) | | |
|Mean |15.9 |16.4 |
|(SD) |.8 |1.4 |
|Gender | | |
|Male |53.6% |47.3% |
|Female |46.4% |52.7% |
|Race/Ethnicity | | |
|European American |59.6% |56.6% |
|African American |38.6% |38.8% |
|Other |1.8% |4.7% |
Table 2
Correlational analyses of attachment and school factors
I. Attachment organization as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview correlated with school factors
| |Annual Weighted GPA |Scholastic Competence |School Risk |Attachment to School |
| | | | | |
|Attachment | | | | |
| Secure |.23** |.10 |-.25** |.12 |
| Preoccupied |-.07 |-.19* |.08 |-.00 |
Note: ***p≤.001, **p≤.01, *p≤.05, +p≤.10.
II. Perception of attachment to one’s mother as measured by the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment correlated with school factors
| |Annual Weighted GPA |Scholastic Competence |School Risk |Attachment to School |
| | | | | |
|Attachment | | | | |
| Maternal |-.04 |.06 |-.11 |.19* |
Note: ***p≤.001, **p≤.01, *p≤.05, +p≤.10.
Table 3
Correlational analyses of attachment and peer relationship factors
I. Attachment organization as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview correlated with peer relationship factors
| |Attachment to |Social Acceptance |Social Acceptance |Close Friendship |Close Friendship |
| |Friends | |(peer report) | |(peer report) |
| | | | | | |
|Attachment | | | | | |
| Secure |.21+ |.14+ |.18* |.21** |.14 |
| Preoccupied |-.23+ |-.11 |-.08 |-.16* |.03 |
Note: ***p≤.001, **p≤.01, *p≤.05, +p≤.10.
II. Perception of attachment to one’s mother as measured by the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment correlated with peer relationship factors
| |Attachment to Friends|Social Acceptance |Social Acceptance |Close Friendship |Close Friendship |
| | | |(peer report) | |(peer report) |
| | | | | | |
|Attachment | | | | | |
| Maternal |.27* |.22** |.14+ |.27*** |.11 |
Note: ***p≤.001, **p≤.01, *p≤.05, +p≤.10.
Table 4
Correlational analyses of peer relationship and school factors
| |Annual Weighted GPA |Scholastic Competence |School Risk |Attachment to School |
|Attachment to |.08 |.05 |-.32** |.39** |
|Friends | | | | |
|Social |-.09 |-.03 |-.06 |-.09 |
|Acceptance | | | | |
|Social |.01 |.16+ |.08 |-.03 |
|Acceptance | | | | |
|(peer report) | | | | |
|Close |-.01 |-.02 |-.20** |.07 |
|Friendship | | | | |
|Close |.22* |.32*** |-.16+ |.11 |
|Friendship | | | | |
|(peer report) | | | | |
Note: ***p≤.001, **p≤.01, *p≤.05, +p≤.10.
Primary Analyses
Analytic strategy. Previous research has linked family relationship characteristics to quality of peer relationships and school performance; likewise, peer relationship characteristics have been correlated with academic achievement. Attachment variables were therefore included as predictors in two of the regression analyses, whereas peer relationships were used as the predictor for one analysis. Hierarchical regression models were used for all analyses, with the demographic variables entered into the model first. The primary variables of interest for the first set of analyses, adolescents’ perceptions of attachment and attachment organization, were entered next to examine the variance in school factors beyond that explained by the three demographic variables (gender, race, and total family income).
Similarly, for the analyses involving attachment and peer factors, attachment measures were used as predictors in hierarchical regression models. Finally, hierarchical regression models were run with peer factors used to examine the variance in academic performance beyond that explained by the demographic variables. All regressions were run to control for participants’ gender, race, and total family income; very few trends and significant correlations became nonsignificant after accounting for these factors. Results from these regression analyses are presented with the main result data.
As mediator effects were also hypothesized, separate regression analyses were run to investigate the role of peer relationship factors as mediators of the relationship between attachment and school variables.
In the final set of analyses, interaction terms of attachment with peer variables were entered into hierarchical regression models to determine their contribution in predicting school success.
Adolescent attachment and school factors. In the first set of analyses, adolescents’ perceptions of attachment and organization of attachment were investigated as predictors of academic variables. Attachment was regressed on the school factors. Beyond the effects of the demographic variables, a trend towards a main effect was found for adolescents’ secure attachment organization and school risk (β = -.15, p ≤ .10), implying that a secure attachment somewhat accounts for lowered school risk. A significant main effect was found for preoccupied attachment organization and peer-reported scholastic competence (β = -.25, p ≤ .01), such that lowered scholastic competence was predicted by preoccupied attachment. Finally, perceptions of attachment to the adolescent’s mother were related to school risk (β = -.17, p ≤ .05) and attachment to school (β = .22, p ≤ .05). Therefore, those adolescents who perceived greater attachment to their mothers had stronger attachments to school and a lessened likelihood of being suspended, expelled, or dropping out of school. Regression analyses of the attachment and school factors are presented in Tables 5 and 6.
Table 5
Hierarchical regression analyses of attachment organization as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview predicting academic functioning after accounting for gender, race, and total family income
| |Annual Weighted GPA |Scholastic Competence |School Risk |Attachment to School |
| | | | | |
|Predictors |β R² ΔR² |β R² ΔR² |β R² ΔR² |β R² ΔR² |
|I: | | | | |
|Gender | | | | |
|Race | | | | |
|Income | | | | |
| | | | | |
|II: | | | | |
|Security | | | | |
|III: | | | | |
|Preoccupation | | | | |
|I: | | | | | |
|Gender | | | | | |
|Race | | | | | |
|Income | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
|II: | | | | | |
|Perception of | | | | | |
|Maternal | | | | | |
|Attachment | | | | | |
|I: | | | | | |
|Gender | | | | | |
|Race | | | | | |
|Income | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
|II: | | | | | |
|Security | | | | | |
|III: | | | | | |
|Preoccupation | | | | | |
|I: | | | | |
|Gender | | | | |
|Race | | | | |
|Income | | | | |
| | | | | |
|II: | | | | |
|Perception of | | | | |
|Maternal | | | | |
|Attachment | | | | |
|I: | | | | |
|Gender | | | | |
|Race | | | | |
|Income | | | | |
| | | | | |
|II: | | | | |
|Attachment to | | | | |
|Friends | | | | |
|I: | | | | | |
|Gender | | | | | |
|Race | | | | | |
|Income | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
|II: | | | | | |
|Social Acceptance | | | | | |
|(peer report) | | | | | |
|III: | | | | | |
|Close Friendship | | | | | |
|(peer report) | | | | | |
|Attachment Measure: |-.25** |.21+ |-.32** |Not significant |Yes |
|Secure AAI | | | | | |
|School Measure: | | | | | |
|School Risk | | | | | |
|Peer Measure: | | | | | |
|Peer Attachment | | | | | |
|Attachment Measure: |-.25** |.21** |-.20** |-.22** |Yes, although weak |
|Secure AAI | | | | | |
|School Measure: | | | | | |
|School Risk | | | | | |
|Peer Measure: | | | | | |
|Close Friendship | | | | | |
|(peer report) | | | | | |
|Attachment Measure: |-.19* |-.16* |.32*** |-.20* |No |
|Preoccupied AAI | | | | | |
|School Measure: | | | | | |
|Scholastic | | | | | |
|Competence | | | | | |
|(peer report) | | | | | |
|Peer Measure: | | | | | |
|Close Friendship | | | | | |
|(self-report) | | | | | |
|(Controlled) |-.15+ |.18* |-.16* |Not significant |No |
|Attachment Measure: | | | | | |
|Secure AAI | | | | | |
|School Measure: | | | | | |
|School Risk | | | | | |
|Peer Measure: | | | | | |
|Close Friendship | | | | | |
|(self-report) | | | | | |
Note: ***p≤.001, **p≤.01, *p≤.05, +p≤.10. β weights are from variables’ first entry into model.
Interactions of attachment and peer relationships. Adolescents’ perceptions of attachment to mothers and to peers were investigated to examine whether they might interact to predict total attachment to school. A significant interaction was found (β = .25, p ≤ .05) and is depicted in Figure 1. The lowest attachment to school was found for teenagers who had perceptions of high attachment to mothers and low attachment to peers. Slightly greater, yet still low, attachment to school was found for adolescents with perceptions of both low attachment to mothers and to peers. This group was relatively close on level of attachment to school to those teenagers with low maternal attachment and high peer attachment. Comparatively high levels of attachment to school were found for adolescents with high perceptions of attachment to mothers and to peers.
Figure 1
Interaction between perception of attachment to one’s mother and perception of attachment to peers resulting in varying levels of total attachment to school
Overall, the data collected in this study suggest three predictive relationships: 1) attachment predicting school performance, 2) attachment predicting peer relationships, and 3) peer relationships predicting school performance. Both perceptions of maternal attachment and attachment organization predicted academic factors. Likewise, regression equations support that both perceptions of secure maternal attachment and secure attachment organization predict greater peer relationships. Additionally, greater peer relationships predicted more positive school outcomes. Some evidence of perceived peer attachment serving as a mediator between secure attachment organization and school risk was found, but only when demographic influences were not considered in the models. Also supported was a significant interaction between perceptions of attachment to one’s mother and to peers resulting in varying levels of attachment to school.
Discussion
This study provides evidence for the independent links between adolescent attachment, peer relationships, and school factors, while also providing support for the possibility of peer relationships serving as a mediator between attachment and school variables. An interaction among these three domains is also supported, with varying levels of perceived attachment to one’s mother and perceived attachment to peers predicting attachment to school.
Connections between attachment and school performance were hypothesized, and data from this study suggest that such relationships exist. Attachment organization predicted several different aspects of school success, as adolescents with secure attachment organizations were less likely to encounter disciplinary difficulties. Also, teenagers with preoccupied attachment organizations had lower peer-reported scholastic competence. Additionally, one’s perception of maternal attachment predicted less likelihood of disciplinary action.
Not all school variables could be predicted from individuals’ attachment, however, with both attachment to school and GPA not being predicted by maternal attachment perceptions or attachment organization. This result could be accounted for if one assumes that teenagers’ specific relationships within the academic environment (such as those with only their school peers and teachers) most greatly affect satisfaction in the school environment. This conclusion follows from the assumption that perceptions of attachment with parents and peers and attachment organization do not necessarily represent teenagers’ general relationship quality. However, attachment theory predicts that attachment organization should affect one’s internal model of all relationships, so this finding remains somewhat surprising.
The lack of support for GPA being predicted by attachment variables can be explained, though, by this study’s omission of an analysis of certain factors intuitively related to scholastic performance. For example, teenagers’ IQ, the quality of the school and home environments, and additional family factors such as parent emphasis on education were not investigated. These factors’ relationship to academic achievement should be considered in future studies. Additional work could also study attachment and school performance while controlling for these additional factors, perhaps allowing a closer relationship between attachment and school performance to be found.
In the analyses of attachment organization and peer factors, secure and preoccupied attachments predicted several peer relationship variables. As hypothesized, adolescents with more secure attachment organizations were perceived by themselves and their friends to have high levels of peer group acceptance. This finding is congruent with attachment theory, as those individuals with secure attachment organizations should have an internal working model that allows them to foster the development of positive relationships with others. Teenagers with preoccupied attachment organizations were less likely to report having a close friendship, also as predicted by attachment theory, as an insecure internal working model should make close interpersonal relationships both harder to develop and more difficult to perceive in one’s environment (Allen et al., 1998; Bowlby, 1973/1977/1989; Cassidy, Kirsh, Scolton, & Parke, 1996; Dodge, 1993; Slough & Greenberg, 1990). However, preoccupied attachment organization was not found to predict teenagers’ social acceptance, or peers’ perceptions of preoccupied teenagers’ close friendships. Therefore, a preoccupied attachment organization, which is indicative of an insecure internal working model, was most closely associated with self-perceptions of close friendships. As attachment organization should be most closely associated with attachment-like, or close, relationships, relationships with close friends rather than the peer group as a whole would be expected to be more directly related to insecure working models. This study’s findings support this assertion.
Perceptions of attachment were likewise predictive of teenagers’ quality of peer relationships. Attachment perceptions were most strongly linked with self-reported social acceptance and close friendships. It is possible that individuals’ tendencies to view the world in either a positive or negative light contributed to these results. Having found that teenagers’ self-reports of attachment and self-reports of peer measures correlate may be due to reporter bias effects. However, trends were noted for perceptions of attachment predicting peer-reported social acceptance and the presence of a close friendship. These trends suggest that self-perceptions of attachment may be related to teenagers’ peer relationships above and beyond the effect due to all measures coming from the same reporter. Perhaps if future studies utilize other measures of social acceptance and close friendship, such as observational reports, the discrepancy between self- and peer- reported data would be resolved, and the linkage between perceptions of attachment and peer relationship quality could be clarified.
Self- and peer-reported peer relationship quality were also found to relate to academic factors, predicting a wide range of school outcomes. Teenagers’ self-reported attachment to their friends predicted how frequently teenagers had discipline problems as well as adolescents’ attachment to school. Low levels of discipline problems were additionally predicted by teenagers’ reports of close friendships. These findings suggest that having a close friend may serve as a protective factor against school discipline problems, as those teenagers who believe they have a reliable friend may be less likely to act out in the classroom or submit to negative peer pressure, actions that may result in school suspensions or expulsions. Also, peer-reported close friendships were predictive of peer-reported scholastic competence as well as students’ GPA, as was hypothesized. This finding supports the assertion that students doing well in school are more likely to have a close friend.
As only trends were noted for social acceptance variables, acceptance by one’s peer group was not an important peer predictive factor for scholastic success. Perhaps this is because adolescents may need only one good friendship to protect them from low scholastic performance and dissatisfaction with school, rather than wide peer acceptance. The results could also be accounted for by the varying influences of peer groups; both positive and negative peer pressure may influence school performance, with the negative effects of being close to one’s peer group offsetting the positive effects for some teenagers.
Regression analyses suggest that peer relationship factors may serve as mediators between attachment and school variables in a couple specific instances. It is only when attachment organization is used that mediated effects were found, suggesting that security of attachment organization, not perceptions of attachment, is crucial in the mediator relationship. Furthermore, significant mediated effects only occur when gender, race, and total family income are not entered into the regression equations, as these demographic variables are significantly confounded with the mediated relationships. Under these conditions, the connection between secure attachment and lower levels of discipline problems is mediated by perceptions of peer attachment. That is, the relationship between security and school outcomes becomes nonsignificant once the effect of teenagers’ attachment to their peers is considered. The relationship between security and disciplinary action is also weakly mediated by peer reports of close friendships. Hence, although only two mediated effects were found, data do suggest that in some specific situations, peer relationship quality may act as a mediator for the relationship between attachment and school outcomes.
An alternative explanation for the presence of only two mediated effects is that perhaps, in general, peer relationships do not serve as a mediator for the connection between attachment and school factors. It is possible that one piece of the attachment construct predicts peer relationship quality, another piece of the attachment construct predicts school outcomes, and that these two pieces of attachment are non-overlapping aspects of the construct. This would account for the lack of mediated effects for all of the controlled relationships investigated and would explain the independent connections between the three constructs (attachment, peer relationships, and school outcomes) being investigated.
One final relationship between the three constructs was found; an interaction was supported with perceived attachment to mothers and perceived attachment to peers predicting students’ satisfaction with school, commitment to class work, and reactions to their teachers. High perceived attachment to mothers and low perceived attachment to peers predicted the lowest attachment to school. This result suggests that adolescents can be divided into distinct groups based on perceived maternal and peer attachment, and that these groups have varying levels of school attachment. There is a group of teenagers who are happiest at home, feeling a strong connection to their mothers and yet, because of not feeling connected to their peers, are struggling in the school environment. That is, the data suggest that adolescents with high levels of perceived attachment to parents and peers are likely to be satisfied with school, except in cases where high levels of perceived attachment to one’s mother are not balanced by high levels of perceived attachment to peers. For most adolescents, though, the greater the perceived attachment to one’s mother and peers, the higher the level of attachment to school, as was hypothesized. For all teenagers, higher perceived attachment to peers predicted a greater connection to school; it seems that the effect of high perceived attachment varies only for teenagers’ perceived maternal attachment.
One interesting conclusion from these mediator and moderator results has to do with the differences in the findings investigating attachment perceptions and attachment organization. Although the links between attachment and peers as well as those between attachment and school were evident when using both the IPPA and AAI, this was not the case for the mediated and moderated relationships. Findings of this study support peer relationships serving as a mediator between attachment organization and school measures. No such relationships were found for perceptions of attachment. This may be a result of attachment organization unconsciously affecting peer relationships, which in turn may predict school success. Whatever its cause, simply perceiving that one’s relationship with attachment figures is secure is not sufficient to foster peer relationships and their resulting positive effects on academic life. Similarly, a perception of a negative parental relationship may not be damaging to peer relations and school life if one can reflect on these experiences coherently, hence forming a secure attachment organization.
Although attachment organization may be crucial in discovering mediated relationships, it is also plausible that the lack of mediators found in the investigation of attachment perceptions could be indicative of a lack of true peer mediators. It is possible that some other variable is mediating the connection between home life and scholastic performance, and that the few cases in which mediated relationships were found were simply due to this other association. Hence, the need for further work in this area is evident.
Even though attachment organization could be used as a predictor variable in significant mediated relationships, it was only perceptions of attachment that were found to interact with peer factors to produce varying levels of attachment to school. This is evidence that it is teenagers’ view of their relationships, rather than actual attachment organization, that is necessary in the moderated relationship among parent-child relations, peer relations, and school attachment. That is, the teenagers who feel the lowest attachment to school may only perceive positive relationships with their mothers and poor relationships with their peers; however, these perceptions do affect their actual satisfaction with school.
There are several implications of the findings of this study. The lack of strong evidence for the mediating or moderating role of all of the peer relationship factors investigated suggests that there could be other facets of the peer relationship not investigated in this study that may explain connections between attachment and school factors. It is also possible that some factor that is not related to adolescents’ peer relations could serve as a primary mediator or moderator between attachment and school outcomes. For example, teacher-child relationships, parenting style, and quality of the home environment could be studied in the future, clarifying these factors’ roles in linking parent-child relationships to adolescents’ school satisfaction and performance.
Also, this study has a few inconsistencies in its findings, particularly discrepancies among the data from different reporters and among the different measures of peer and school constructs (that is, peer attachment, social acceptance, and the presence of a close friendship; and GPA, scholastic competence, school risk, and attachment to school). The inconsistencies across reporters suggests the need for observational peer and school data, or teacher reports rather than self- and peer-reported ratings. Furthermore, future directions of research may investigate why certain factors within the peer and school constructs were better predictor, mediator, and moderator variables.
There are also some limitations of this study’s design that require attention. First, the ability to generalize findings from the sample is in question. A group of academically at-risk teenagers were recruited as study participants. It is unclear whether the links between the three constructs, as well as the mediated and moderated effects found in this study, would hold with a more inclusive adolescent population. However, the use of the limited sample was beneficial in some respects, as it allowed for data collection from a sample of individuals with a wide range of scholastic difficulties, helping to provide meaningful results. Additionally, there was diversity in the perceptions of attachment and attachment organizations of the participating teenagers which also allowed for sufficient variance within the sample.
An additional limitation of this study is its difficulty in determining theoretically meaningful definitions of peer relationship factors and adolescent attachment. Close peer relationships may mean different things to different teenagers, and the actual structure of adolescents’ friendships may vary greatly. Furthermore, the impact of social groups and individual friendships on development varies among teenagers, with some peers reinforcing academically prosocial goals, while others undermining school success. Future work may wish to address these issues, as well as examine how in some cases peers may serve as attachment figures for one another.
In addition to the limitations of the peer relationship factors, problems also emerge with the construct of attachment. Adolescent attachment is an emerging area of study. Researchers have presented differing ways in which adolescent attachment may be conceptualized; for example, attachment may be defined as perceptions of attachment within adolescent relationships (Bowlby, 1989) or attachment organization (Main et al., 1985). The most optimal manner in which to measure an individual’s attachment security also remained to be determined. Hence, the validity of present measures of attachment is questionable. Additionally, Kobak and Sceery (1988) have suggested that the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) may be lacking in validity except when used with individuals in late adolescence or adulthood.
Unfortunately, the validity of the other measure of attachment used in this study, the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA), is also questionable if used as a measure of attachment organization (rather than just as a measure of perceptions of the parent-child relationship). As the IPPA measures perceived closeness, a report of a negative relationship with one’s parents on the IPPA is not necessarily indicative of an insecure relationship. In fact, being able to reflect on negative life experiences in an organized fashion, allowing for the acknowledgement of the impact of disturbing episodic memories, and yet integrating these memories into a coherent whole, is characteristic of security. An individual who does reflect in this manner would be categorized as having a secure attachment organization by the AAI, and yet would be low on security according to the IPPA. Likewise, denial of the importance of negative events in one’s past, as evidenced by the presence of negative episodic memories but positive descriptions of one’s childhood, would result in a secure classification on the IPPA, but is evidence of an insecure attachment organization. Thus, the IPPA is not necessarily a valid measure of attachment, but rather an indicator of various perceived characteristics and qualities of the parent-child relationship. This is the capacity in which the IPPA was used in this study and it is therefore crucial to recognize the differences in results from the IPPA versus the AAI. When investigating attachment organization and perceptions of attachment, the differences in the IPPA and AAI make the results from these two attachment measures difficult to combine into one attachment construct. Future study could focus on the area of adolescent attachment measurement, hopefully eliminating some of the difficulties in researching this construct.
Lastly, there are important limitations in the way that the construct of positive school outcomes was defined. There are several different ways that teenagers, parents, and teachers may conceive adolescent school success, such as happiness in the school environment, classroom participation, and the obtainment of advanced degrees. In this study, success in school was defined in terms of teenagers’ grades, peer-reported success in school, disciplinary actions, and self-reports of connections to school. Despite the care given to the selection of these school variables, it is possible that these measures did not encompass school success in the most meaningful way. If this is the case, perhaps future work could investigate the additional ways in which school success can be defined, so as to see if in clarifying the definition stronger results are obtained.
In conclusion, despite its limitations, the present study provides support for the independent links between attachment perceptions and organization, peer relationships, and school factors during adolescence. Also supported is the possible role of peer relationships as a mediator (when investigating attachment organization) or moderator (when investigating perceptions of maternal attachment). Additional research is suggested in this area, however, so as to clarify the impact of additional family and school environment factors that may influence academic achievement. More precise conceptualizations of the three constructs would also help further this area of study, allowing for greater precision in defining exactly what elements of the parent-child and peer relationships predict meaningful aspects of school success.
A better understanding of the relationships among attachment, peer relations, and school outcomes is valuable as it may serve to focus interventions for academically at-risk adolescents. As academic success does influence a wide range of developmental outcomes, possible findings could positively affect many aspects of teenagers’ lives. With the recognition that attachment perceptions, attachment organization, and peer relations affect educational outcomes, the importance of developing academic interventions that extend beyond classroom scholastic instruction becomes evident. Hopefully the relationships among the constructs of attachment, peer relations, and school success will soon be more thoroughly understood. Such knowledge could allow for the development of successful intervention programs which, through targeting aspects of attachment and peer relationships, may result in higher levels of educational and developmental success for teenagers.
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