A Study On Middle-school Students' Alienation From School And Its Correlation With Coping Styles

Alienation from school (AFS) is referred to as some negative feelings includingloneness, meaninglessness, powerlessness, normlessness, which are sometimesexperienced by students, because of their own alienation relationship to what theirteachers and classmates behave during schooling activities. Even though there havebeen a variety of the studies of AFS whose findings are both productive and fruitful, we,Chinese scholars, do little with the AFS. With economic development, although thepresent substantial conditions of students have bettered very much in our country, thestudent also produces definite alienation to school, especially the middle-school student,owing to the disadvantages of education institution and themselves ect.. So the study onAFS has great theoretical and practical meaning in our country. This research is relative to the concepts of alienation and AFS, survey methods, thestudy status of AFS and the relation between coping styles (CS) and AFS. Then it adoptsAFS questionnaire compiled by author and Xiao Jihua's coping-style scale toinvestigate the status of the middle-school-student AFS and their coping styles. Thefollowing is main conclusions. First, AFS includes four subscales: loneness,meaninglessness, powerlessness, normlessness. Largely, the compiled AFS scaleaccords with measuring standards so that it can be a formal measuring tool. Second,There are significant differences for gender, grade and family-and-schools' locuses.That is , Boys' AFS is significantly higher than the girls'. Grade-one students' AFS injunior middle school or high school is much lower, and the grade-three students' AFShigher. But for the students from cities, the alienation is much stronger inmeaninglessness and lower in loneness than those from villages or towns. Studentsfrom village-or-town middle schools suffer much more meaninglessness and lonenessthan the ones in city middle schools. Third, the correlation between every CS' subscaleand every AFS' is significant. The students having weak AFS are inclined to adoptpositive or mature CS, contrarily, adopting negative or immature CS. After that, the literature discusses the results and analyses the reason producing AFSand its relation with CS by visiting, investigating and case-analysing methods. Somesuggestion is following. 1.Setting up good motives to eliminate meaninglessness.2.Harmonizing student-teacher relation and adopting behaviour remedy to alleviatenormlessness. 3.Altering unsuitable expectancy and forming self-confidence to weakenpowerlessness. 4.Giving psychological guidance and adjusting individual behaviour tolower loneness and increase belonging. 5.helping effortfully students change negative orimmature CS to weaken AFS.