HIGH-SCHOOL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE STUDENTS TO REMAIN IN SCHOOL

This article describes part of a study to understand the ways in which school factors influence high school students to stay in school for the senior secondary noncompulsory years. A causal model was proposed in which student background characteristics and school factors had direct influence on students' intentions and also had less direct influence through two interventing variables, namely, student achievement level and student perceptions of the quality of school life. An important step in the study was establishing which schools were significantly different from each other (substantially and statistically) after controlling for student background characteristics. A series of regression analyses appropriate for the model was carried out with school membership represented by a set of dummy variables. Each dummy regression coefficient was then converted to a more easily interpreted statistic, namely, the deviation of the dependent variable at school level from its grand mean after controlling for other independent variables. The adjusted deviations identified groups of schools that were significantly different from each other. Quantitative and qualitative information about significantly different schools then indicated the parameters that should be more closely observed to understand the school factors producing the school differences.