Abstract
Background
Poverty’s impact on children’s academic outcome is a cause for concern in most urban Asian cities as education is viewed as one of the main channels of social mobility. Few studies examined how poor children’s hope could be enhanced through school social support.
Objective
This paper examines how children from low-income families’ perceived frequencies and importance of social support from teachers and classmates, influence their levels of hope in academic achievement.
Method
Utilizing a partially-mixed sequential design—first, with survey data from a larger study on low-income children (n = 513), this paper explores if perceived frequency of social support is associated with level of hope as well as the role of perceived importance in moderating the frequencies of school social support on sense of hope; second, to enrich the child-reported results, two in-depth focus group discussions with elementary school teachers (n = 10) were conducted.
Results
Statistical analysis reveals that the frequency of social support from teachers and classmates is associated with the level of hope in low-income children. Furthermore, when teacher’s support was rated important by children, there was a positive association between social support and hope. Integrating statistical results and qualitative insights, this paper extends extant literature on social support typologies with a novel category; ‘support in providing opportunities for success’.
Conclusion
This paper underscores the important role schools play as a source of social support for children. Such social support aids higher hope levels in low-income children which could translate into better academic outcomes.
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We are grateful to the Ministry of Social and Family Development in facilitating the collection of data for this paper. MSF does not endorse the research project or its findings, methods or results in any way, and any views, findings or results arising from the research project in the publication or presentation are strictly the authors’ own.
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This research project is funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education Social Science Research Thematic Grant MOE2016-SSRTG-039 granted to the second author.
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All of the authors contributed to the development of the study concept. Data collection was performed by SRD. SRD and DJW performed the statistical data analysis. SRD and ECLG performed the qualitative data analysis. All of the authors contributed to the interpretation of results. SRD drafted the manuscript. All of the authors reviewed and edited several versions of the manuscript and provided critical revisions. All of the authors approved the final manuscript for submission.
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David, S.R., Wen, D.J. & Goh, E.C.L. Identifying the Relationship Between Strength of School Social Support and Level of Hope in Children from Low-Income Families. Child Youth Care Forum (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-023-09777-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-023-09777-2