Relationships Among Supports and Barriers and Career and Educational Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Investigation

Interest in the roles of environmental supports and barriers in career and educational development has increased steadily over the past few decades, enough to warrant a meta-analysis of this vast and still growing literature. The current study presents the results of a meta-analytic investigation, employing 276 samples drawn from 249 published articles (N = 104,440), on the relationships of supports and barriers to nine different career and educational outcomes. Employing a random effects meta-analytic model and sampling and measurement error-corrected effect size estimates, the study found that supports tended to account for more variance (M = 10%) across all outcomes than did barriers (M = 3%). Several moderators were also found, suggesting that (a) men's self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations are more strongly related to supports than women's, (b) Latino(a) students' levels of school engagement and performance are more weakly related to supports than White students, and (c) supports (and perhaps barriers) seem to be more highly related to elementary school students' levels school engagement than high school students. The implications of the results are discussed as well as potential avenues for future investigation suggested by some gaps in the literature uncovered in this meta-analysis.