School Culture and Academic Alienation: Mediating Role of Basic Psychological Needs

Alienation is a problem that some of the students are afflicted with during their study. Alienated students usually turn into adults who are afflicted with social alienation and lack of political and economic capabilities. According to self determination theory, the living environment as well as basic psychological needs of the students affect their alienation. The main objective of this paper is to study the relationship between school culture with academic alienation in the light of the intermediary role of basic psychological needs. Hence, 289 students of intermediate schools of the city of Qum were selected through cluster sampling who responded to the questions of the following questionnaire: Academic Alienation, School Culture and Basic Psychological Needs. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. The results of the research indicate that basic psychological needs play an intermediary role in relationship between school culture and academic alienation. Basic psychological needs has a significant negative effect on academic alienation and the effect of school culture on basic psychological needs is significant and positive. Overall, the tested model had sufficient fitness and predicted 60 percent of variance in academic alienation.