Perceiving High or Low Home-School Dissonance: Longitudinal Effects on Adolescent Emotional and Academic Well-Being

Abstract

For some adolescents, the beliefs, values, and behavioral expectations at home and at school are in conflict, and negotiating the boundaries between these two contexts is difficult. We administered surveys, including a scale assessing perceptions of home-school dissonance, to an ethnically diverse sample of students (N = 475) in the 5th grade in elementary school and the following year in middle school. Contrary to our hypothesis, African American students did not report more dissonance than European American students. High dissonance students (top 3rd on the Dissonance scale) were more angry and self-deprecating, had lower self-esteem, were less hopeful, felt less academically efficacious, and had a lower grade point average than did low dissonance students (bottom 3rd on the scale). Additionally, high dissonance students experienced a greater decline in grade point average, and less of a decline in anger than did low dissonance students when they moved to middle school.