Pathways of resilience : predicting school engagement trajectories for South African adolescents living in a stressed environment

Abstract

School engagement is associated with the resilience of adolescents living in stressed environments in sub-Saharan Africa. Even so, there is scant understanding of the antecedents of African students’ school engagement. In response, this article reports the results of an exploratory study conducted in 2018 and 2020 with a sample of 172 adolescents (average age: 16.02 years; SD = 1.67) from a risk-exposed municipality in South Africa. Clustered school engagement trajectories were identified using a longitudinal variant of k-means based on affective, behavioural, and cognitive school engagement. Evolutionary classification trees were used to identify meaningful predictors of the identified trajectories. The results point to specific combinations of factors – i.e., student age, parental/caregiver warmth, school resource levels, teacher competence – that sustained low and high school engagement trajectories. These combinations direct the attention of school psychologists and other service providers to the multiple systems that matter in varying ways for the school engagement of African students. They also call for continued investigation of the resource combinations that are salient to student engagement across stressed environments in sub-Saharan Africa.