This paper analyzes the impact of personal, family, and school factors on the school maladjustment. It specifically focuses on maladjustment in learning, finds out the factors that affect maladjustment in students\' perception and behavior, and tests if these factors also affect school achievement level.
The authors created analyzed survey data collected from 6,486 high school students and 3,206 vocational high school students among 140 high schools nationwide in Korea, and used hierarchical linear model(HLM) in order to identify the two different dimensions of the effect-personal and school.
According to the analysis, the authors find that while variables that denote structural factors of a family, such as the level of educational attainments of parents, or whether students live with their parents or not, have an effect on maladjustment, a more important aspect is that these factors have an effect on maladjustment mediated by the functional factors of a family, such as
parents-students relations and the style of child rearing of the parents.
The paper also finds that maladjustment in learning comes out of the accumulated difficulties in learning and that although the impact of the school factors on maladjustment in learning is not so large as expected, the tendency of schools to enhance rules and norms have an positive effect on school maladjustment. In addition, it shows that the three different factors-perceptions on learning maladjustment, behavior of learning maladjustment, and school achievement- should be understood in different context.