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Parent-Adolescent Vocational Aspiration Congruence and its Relations with Academic Adjustment

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Abstract

Adolescents’ own vocational aspirations and those of parents for their adolescent children play significant roles in adolescents’ development. The present study examined how the (in)congruence between adolescents’ vocational aspirations and their parents’ aspirations for them were associated with adolescents’ academic achievement and test anxiety. The study’s sample included 662 parent-adolescent pairs (adolescent Mage = 14.09), and the aspiration and adjustment data were collected at intervals 3 years apart. Using polynomial regression analyses and surface graphs, parent-child aspiration congruence was found to be significantly associated with later academic achievement and test anxiety, but incongruence did not show any significant relationship with either outcome. Such patterns were more prominent among boys (n = 306) than girls and among high socioeconomic status (SES) adolescents (n = 324) than among low SES adolescents. The findings suggest that academic adjustment is more predictable when there is parent-child congruence than when there is incongruence in aspirations.

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Notes

  1. We acknowledge that aspirations are conceptually different from expectations, where aspirations refer to ideal goals and expectations refer to realistic goals. However, due to a lack of studies on parents’ aspirations for their children and partly due to the interchangeable nature of the terms in a few studies, we reviewed research in both areas.

  2. In an alternative analysis, we included the 48 cases in the low-SES group and analyzed the models. The reason that we included them in the low-SES group and not the high-SES one was to balance the sample size. The results from the alternative analysis were no different from the results reported in the current manuscript.

  3. In the beginning phase of the study, school type (i.e., whether one follows a vocational school track or an academic school track) was added as a moderator but it was dropped from the final manuscript because (a) the sample size of each group was not equivalent (i.e., 73% of the sample attending academically oriented high schools) and (b) the construct was closely related with SES (i.e., those from lower SES backgrounds are more likely to attend vocational schools).

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Authors' Contributions

B.L. conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, and drafted the manuscript; H.I.P. participated in the design, performed the statistical analysis, participated in interpretation of the data, and drafted the method and result sections of the manuscript; S.P. participated in coordination of the study and interpretation of the data, and helped drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data Sharing and Declaration

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The original datasets are publicly available from the website of Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training.

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  1. Department of Education, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea

    Bora Lee & Soungjuu Park

  2. Department of Psychology, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea

    Hyung In Park

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  1. Bora Lee
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Correspondence to Hyung In Park.

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Lee, B., Park, H.I. & Park, S. Parent-Adolescent Vocational Aspiration Congruence and its Relations with Academic Adjustment. J Youth Adolescence 51, 1374–1387 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-022-01598-1

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