Project 4

Due to processes of social change a reconfiguration of social origin, immigrant background and positioning in the German education system can be observed: more young people of a low social origin or with an immigrant background find themselves in higher secondary schools. However, this also results in more status inconsistencies, e.g., for adolescents from high- SES families with less successful school careers, or for students with an immigrant background who perform very well. In this project, we investigate how such contradictory influences in the family and in school affect adolescents’ efficacy beliefs at different levels (personal, group, system), i.e. their belief regarding what they can achieve as an individual, as a member of a particular social group and within a certain social system. We consider schools to be crucial in this respect, since adolescents not only spend a lot of time at school during a very formative phase of their lives, but also because they have their first experiences with a social institution and its representatives (the teachers) there, and they learn how they and their group are treated in this system. We assume that these experiences are not only influential for efficacy beliefs in the domain of education but are also generalized to other social subsystems such as politics.