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How is family support related to students’ GPA scores? A longitudinal study

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… if you can’t depend on your family, who else is there?

—Comment posted to the online blog momaroo.com, 2-23-10

Abstract

Previous studies of the influence of family support on college students’ academic performance have yielded inconsistent results. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the link between family support and students’ university-level academic performance in a more detailed way. First, we sought to clarify how two distinct aspects of perceived family support—social support and economic support—affect college students’ academic performance. Second, we sought to determine how these two aspects of family support influence not only cumulative GPA scores but also the overall trend (slope) and stability (variability) of students’ GPA scores across semesters. The participants in this longitudinal study were 240 university students (62 men, 178 women). The results revealed that the level of perceived family social support was important not only as a “main effect” predictor of the magnitude and stability of the students’ GPA scores across three successive semesters, but also as a factor that helped female students to succeed regardless of their level of family economic support. In general, the data suggest that family social support is more important to women’s success in college than to men’s.

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Notes

  1. A more stringent test would require us to control for the first semester GPA (i.e., the Spring 2008 GPA) when testing the “slope” and “variance” models. When we did so, we found the same results as before (that is, the originally significant predictor was still significant in the same direction in each case, even after controlling for the Spring 2008 GPA score. However, because the Spring 2008 GPA score was itself significantly correlated with one of our two primary predictor variables, family social support, r = 0.23, p < .001, controlling for the Spring 2008 GPA score also “partials out” variance associated with our main predictor, creating an overly stringent and potentially misleading test of the predictive utility of the perceived family social support variable. For that reason, the results reported above do not control for the first semester GPA score as a covariate (for more on this type of situation, see Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Wen Cheng

  2. University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA

    William Ickes

  3. Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, H. Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Lesley Verhofstadt

Authors
  1. Wen Cheng
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  2. William Ickes
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  3. Lesley Verhofstadt
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Correspondence to Lesley Verhofstadt.

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Cheng, W., Ickes, W. & Verhofstadt, L. How is family support related to students’ GPA scores? A longitudinal study. High Educ 64, 399–420 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9501-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9501-4

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