The relationships among ethnic identity, other group orientation, and fatalism in understanding attitudes toward education, school, and achievement among youth of Mexican descent

The goal of the current study was to examine the relationships among ethnic identity, other group orientation, fatalism, attitude toward education and school, and academic achievement. It was proposed that both ethnic identity and other group orientation would be positively related to attitude toward education and school and GPA, while fatalism would be negatively related to these variables. Two-hundred-twenty-two adolescents of Mexican origin living in Texas completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (Phinney, 1992a), the fatalism scale of the Multiphasic Assessment of Cultural Constructs-Short Form (MACC-SF; Arnold & Cuéllar, 1985), and the attitude scale of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory-High School version (Weinstein & Palmer, 1990a), while GPAs were obtained directly from the schools. Results demonstrated that higher other group orientation scores were positively related to attitude toward education and school, and GPA. The data also indicated a significant negative relationship between fatalism and attitude toward education and school. Implications among the cultural and psychological variables examined and their implications for explaining and ameliorating academic underachievement among youth of Mexican descent are discussed.