Logistic regression analysis of school anxiety as a predictor of school refusal

Abstract

School refusal has important repercussions on the lives of children and adolescents, seriously affecting their personal, academic, and social adjustment. Negative attitudes towards school can be caused simultaneously for several reasons and, due to the existing heterogeneity, Kearney, and Silverman (1990) grouped them into four functional conditions: I. Avoidance of school stimuli that generate negative affectivity; II. Avoidance of school situations that generate social aversion or fear of evaluation; II. Capturing the attention of significant others; and IV. Get tangible reinforcements outside of school. Given its tendency to coexist with internalizing disorders, it is essential to understand its correlation with school anxiety, which is one of the significant problems in the child and adolescent population. In this way, the present study aims to identify the probability of predictive capacity of school anxiety on high school refusal. There were 1786 participants (51% men) aged 15 to 18 years (MAge = 16.31; SD = 1.00). The instruments administered were the Spanish version of the School Refusal Assessment Scale-Revised (SRAS-R-C; Gonzálvez et al., 2016) and the School Anxiety Inventory (IAES; García-Fernández et al., 2011). The results reveal that depending on the dimension of school anxiety evaluated, it acts as a negative or positive predictor of school refusal, also depending on the type of school refusal assessed. These findings highlight the connection between the avoidance of negative affectivity associated with school and the experience of anxiety in various school settings, emphasizing the need to address both school refusal and anxiety in the educational setting.

Keywords

• logistic regression
• school refusal
• school anxiety
• SRAS-R
• IAES