Adolescents' future in the balance of family, school, and the neighborhood: A multidimensional application of two theoretical perspectives

Objective Family, school, and neighborhood contexts provide cultural resources that may foster children's ambitions and bolster their academic performance. Reference group theory instead highlights how seemingly positive settings can depress educational aspirations, expectations, and performance. We test these competing claims. Methods We test these claims using the British Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 4968). Results Results are broadly in line with the cultural resource perspective. However, important exceptions to this pattern point to reference group processes for children from low‐educated parents, whose academic aspirations are especially low when they either attended an affluent school or lived in an affluent neighborhood—but not both, and for children from highly educated parents attending poor schools, whose realistic expectations of the future are higher than their peers in affluent schools. Conclusion The resource perspective strongly predicts adolescents’ (ideas about) education, but reference group processes also play an important role in neighborhoods and schools.