The effect of teacher-student and student-student relationships on the societal involvement of students

The goal of this paper was to examine the relation between teachers and students and between students on societal involvement in Dutch secondary schools. As such, we studied the role of parents on adolescents’ societal involvement and to what extent positive teacher-student and student-student relationships reduced differences in societal involvement due to parental background differences. To estimate this cross-sectional multilevel analyses, a rich combination of datasets from the Netherlands was used, encompassing 4,128 15-year-old students in 58 schools in 2010/2011. The results showed that teacher-student relations and student-student relations were positively associated with societal involvement. The level of societal involvement differed between students’ from households with lower incomes, level of education and employment, even though parenting styles seemed unrelated to societal involvement. Students from higher educated parents were found to benefit more from these positive relationships with teachers. This advantage arguably amplifies the differences in societal involvement between students with lower and higher educated parents. Future studies can give further insight into the role of classroom interrelations using additional longitudinal data or focus on more qualitative observations to explore the role of classroom interrelations and their influence on developing societal involvement.