Relationship between adolescents' self-concept and school satisfaction

Abstract

Educational research on social and psychological wellbeing has demonstrated that it is an important determinant of mental health among students. Nonetheless, there is lack of consensus among researchers over how students‘ mental health should be measured. Identifying this knowledge gap, this study sought to investigate the relationship between self-concept and school satisfaction among students. A secondary data set of 2756 students aged 10-15 years attending 16 schools in Beijing, collected by Askell-Williams et al. (2016) and 3478 students aged 10-15 in 8 South Australian schools, collected by Skrzypiec (2007) were used for this study. In China, data had been collected from eight primary schools and eight secondary schools (all 16 schools were state schools) located in four districts in Beijing. After explaining the purpose, procedure, confidentiality, and anonymity of the questionnaires, the completion of the questionnaires was supervised by Chinese researchers. The sample comprised of 2,756 students from 64 classes in Grades 5-9. In Australia, purposive sampling had been done in eight schools in South Australia, including two Catholic schools, three government schools, and three independent schools, where middle school students were surveyed. The total of 1,983 participants comprised of 25% South Australian government school children, 29.2% Catholic school children, and the others were independent school children. Factor analysis was used to confirm the factors used in the questionnaires. Reliability analysis was done to determine the reliability of each factor. Correlation analysis was then conducted to determine the relationship between the main constructs – school satisfaction and self-concept. Further, comparing scores between the two countries was done by using independent t-test. Results showed that there is a significant moderate positive correlation (r=0.588, p<0.000, df=2041) between school satisfaction and self-concept of the adolescents which revealed that the greater the self-concept of a student, the higher the school satisfaction.