Justus, Joyce Bennett2022-01-182022-01-181971696https://hdl.handle.net/2139/52797This study focused on the importance of education for the individual citizen, the purposes it fills, and the social and economic needs it satisfies. It was mainly concerned with aspirations, the relevant factors involved in shaping them, and the relationships between these factors and their combined effectiveness as predictors of aspirations or expectations. Questionnaires were administered to 245 adolescents chosen to represent their age cohorts as the apex of the primary and secondary school system. It was found that aspirations were more likely to be influenced by the expectations of parents than any other variable. Respondents generally viewed their parents as having high academic and occupational aspirations for them, and there was a strong positive correlation between what was perceived to be parents' aspirations and the respondents' own aspirations. On the other hand, expectations were highly correlated with academic performance and availability of jobs in the environment. Socio-economic variables such as father's occupation, parent's education, and the like did not contribute much to the explanations of aspirations or expectations. It was also found that, in general, Dominican adolescents had a fairly accurate assessment of the value of their education in terms of its concrete rewards, but that the prestige function of education, and the role of education in social and economic stratification and parental aspirations continued to result in aspirations far above and beyond the respondents' expectationsAdolescentsPh.D.