U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Parent-Adolescent Communication, Family Functioning, and School Performance

NCJ Number
127108
Journal
Adolescence Volume: 25 Issue: 99 Dated: (Fall 1990) Pages: 725-737
Author(s)
V S Masselam; R F Marcus; C L Stunkard
Date Published
1990
Length
13 pages
Annotation
The communication and functioning skills of two sets of families with adolescent children were compared: the first group included adolescents who were succeeding in a public school and the second group included adolescents who had failed in public school and were attending alternative schools. The study's three hypotheses were that parental and child communication skills would be more open in the public school families, that a higher proportion of the public school families would be functioning in the balanced range, and that families in the public school group would demonstrate greater congruence between perceived and ideal family functioning.
Abstract
The characteristics of the two groups, consisting mostly of white, upper-middle class families from a northern Virginia suburban county, differed only in that there were more males in the alternative school group. The results revealed that communication between adolescent and parent were more open in the public school group and that a consistently greater proportion of public school families were in the balanced family functioning range, regardless of whether the classification was based on parent or child self-reports. While there was greater congruence between ideal and actual family functioning in the public school group, this appears to be due to the consistent difference between the groups on the cohesion dimension for all members and to the adolescent scores on the adaptability dimension. 6 tables and 17 references