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Being At-Risk:
The Communication of Social
Support in Ninth Grade
Patrick Daniel Cavanaugh, Jr.,
Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin,
1994
Supervisor: Patricia Witherspoon
Unacceptably high dropout rates continue to plague the American High School. The costs to the individual and society are profound and suggest an impetus for change. While most research has attempted to chronicle the reasons for why students dropout of school, few have examined more global and potentially mediating factors impacting the movement of students from being at-risk of dropping out to dropping out. This study addresses one possible mediating factor: the communication of social support. It is argued that the communication of social support, which has been demonstrated to be effective in mitigating the effects of acute and chronic physical and psychological health problems, may also be instrumental in keeping children in school. As exploratory research, this study focuses on the communication of social support as it was perceived by a sample of ninth grade at-risk boys who attended a large urban/suburban high school in San Antonio, Texas. The findings of this research suggest that the ninth grade boys' social support networks are not very extensive and that each type of support provider in the network is likely to primarily communicate different kinds of social support. Briefly, the results indicate that these ninth grade boys rely predominately on friends and mothers for social support communicating acceptance and assurance. Of particular interest, however, were the findings that the communication of non-support was also perceived as important to the ninth grade boys. Among those who provided more non-support than support were fathers, step-fathers, teachers, and counselors. That is, with the exception of mothers and weak links, adults in the lives of these boys were perceived as primarily non-supportive. The study provides a window into one aspect of the lives of these ninth grade boys and describes it largely in their own words. The implications for intervention are also suggested.
VITA
Patrick Daniel Cavanaugh, Jr. was born in Houston,
Texas on March 5, 1955, the son of Shirley Dolores and Patrick Daniel Cavanaugh.
After completing high school at Bitburg American High School, Bitburg,
Germany in 1973, he attended Tacoma Community College in Tacoma, Washington
from 1974-1975. He graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in 1975.
From 1977-1984, he attended the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1979, a secondary teaching
certificate in 1981, and a Master of Arts degree in 1986. He then entered
the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1986. He taught on the
faculty of the Department of Speech Communication at Southwest Texas State
University in San Marcos, Texas where he taught for five years. During
the time he was not in school, he traveled to various parts of the world.
Over the course of twelve years, he visited sixty-five countries in Africa,
North, Central, and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the
Indian Subcontinent. He currently is on an indefinite hiatus, as
he now cares full time for his and Merrie's two children.
