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The Mediating Role of Students’ Perception of Parental Behaviours between Parental Attachment and School Choice Exploration

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Abstract

Objectives

This study aimed to explore the relationships between students’ perception of parental behaviours towards their children’s choice, parental attachment and students’ exploration when choosing a school.

Method

Participants included 1851 pre-adolescents attending some public middle schools’ third classes. They completed the adaptation to school choices of the Exploration of Vocational Issue Scale—the SIL Scale—to evaluate the students’ perceptions of their parents’ career-related behaviours and the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment to evaluate the parental relationships.

Results

The results showed significant relationships between communication, parental trust and parental alienation in regard to the exploration of choosing a school. Furthermore, the three perceived parental behaviours (support, interference and lack of engagement) partially mediated the relationship between parental attachment and exploration.

Conclusions

The study suggests that a good attachment relationships encourages students to explore their own opportunity to choose the best schooling option only if they feel supported and not bypassed by their parents.

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Author Contributions

This paper is the joint work of all the authors. However, the authors worked together at each part of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Educational Sciences, Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Diego Boerchi

  2. Faculty of Human and Social Science, “Kore” University of Enna, Enna, Italy

    Giulio D’Urso & Ugo Pace

Authors
  1. Diego Boerchi
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  2. Giulio D’Urso
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  3. Ugo Pace
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giulio D’Urso.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards and were approved by the Italian Psychology Association.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Boerchi, D., D’Urso, G. & Pace, U. The Mediating Role of Students’ Perception of Parental Behaviours between Parental Attachment and School Choice Exploration. J Child Fam Stud 28, 3499–3507 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01533-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01533-2

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