Examining the Structural Pattern of Parental Goals, Social Comparison, and Academic Engagement with the Mediating Role of Parent-Child Relationships in Students

This research was conducted to study the structural pattern of parenting goals, social comparison with academic engagement, and the mediating role of parent-child relationships. The research method is descriptive-correlational modeling of structural equations. The statistical population consists of all high school students of Nurabad city (Delfan) in the academic year of 2021 (n=5500). The research sample was 400 high school students of Noorabad city (Delfan) who were selected by cluster sampling method. Le and Impett's (2019) parenting goals questionnaire, Xavier et al.'s Revised Social Comparison (2014), Gunuc and Kuzu's (2015) academic engagement, and Fine et al.'s (1983) Parent-Child Relationship Questionnaire answered online by the research sample. (P≥0.001). Structural equation modeling, AMOS version 24, and SPSS 26 were used to evaluate the proposed model. The correlation coefficient results showed a positive and significant relationship between parental goals and social comparison with parent-child relationships and academic engagement.  Findings indicate that the proposed model fits well with the data. the results of structural equation modeling showed that 64% of the variance of father relations and 37% of the variance of relations with mother are explained by parental goals and social comparison and 63% of the variance of academic engagement by parental goals, and social comparison and parent-child relations. Low levels of social comparison and parental goals and planning can affect children's attitudes and academic engagement.