Investigation of secondary school students in different sociometric status with regard to some variables

The purpose of the present study was to investigate academic achievement, perception about the family environment, perceived social support from family, friends and teachers and also parental acceptance-rejection of secondary school students in popular, rejected and neglected sociometric status.Sample of the study was chosen randomly from the pool of 59 elementary schools in Elazığ as 10 schools in the Academic Year of 2006-2007. Totally 640 students, 307 female and 333 male from 6th, 7th and 8th grades of these 10 schools participated to the study.In order to gather data, sociometric test, Family Environment Questionnaire, Perceived Social Support Scale and Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire were used as measurement instruments. In addition to the instruments, the students? grade point averages from their school records were used to determine their academic achievement. For the analysis of the data, Pearson correlation coefficient, t test, Mann Whitney U test, one-way ANOVA and Scheffe test were used. Significance level is .05 for all the analyses.Findings of the study in terms of gender differences revealed that girls perceive significantly higher social support from their friends and teachers, more cohesiveness from their family environment and also higher acceptance from their family than boys. However, there is no difference between genders in perception of organizational dimension of their family and social support from their family. In the distribution of sociometric status, there is again no difference between genders.When academic achievement variable is taken into consideration, findings show that there are significant differences between sociometric statuses. Popular students are more successful than rejected and neglected groups. Yet, neglected students have significantly higher academic achievement than rejected students. Regarding cohesion and organization dimensions of the family environment, there are no significant differences between sociometric groups. Popular, rejected and neglected students perceive social support from their families and teachers at the same degree. On the other hand, considering perceived social support from friends, there is a significant difference only between popular and rejected groups; popular students perceive more social support than rejected students. Last point in the findings is about parental acceptance and rejection. Only difference appears between popular and rejected groups; popular group perceive higher acceptance from their parents than rejected group.The results of the study differ in some respect from other related studies. The unique structure of Turkish culture and family can be shown as the reason of this difference.