title: Concern or confidence? Adolescents' identity capital and future worry in different school contexts.
abstract: This present study investigated the roles identity capital and school's socio-economic status have on adolescent worry about future education, employment, and social status. The 354 participants were 14- to 15-year-old students from affluent (56.8%) and disadvantaged (43.2%) Finnish lower secondary schools. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesis that a higher level of family-related identity capital is connected to a lower level of future worry, and that this connection is mediated through intrapersonal forms of identity capital, specifically academic self-concept and general self-efficacy. Adolescent future worry was also examined across school status with an independent samples t-test. The findings suggest that, in the relatively equal societal context in Finland, adolescents are rather confident about their future education, employment, and social status regardless of the socio-economic status of the school they attend, and when their level of identity capital is high the future worry decreases further.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning and Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finland. Electronic address: jenni.tikkanen@utu.fi.
authors.forename: Jenni
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tikkanen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D005195:Family Relations / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012574:Schools; D012649:Self Concept; D012931:Social Environment; D012933:Social Identification; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D035862:Vulnerable Populations / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Adolescent future worry; Educational stratification; Finland; Identity capital; Late modernity; Lower secondary school