Self-Reported Reasons for Students' Absenteeism at a Predominantly Black Urban University

Abstract

A scale containing 51 reasons for absenteeism was given to 169 students at a predominantly black inner-city university. Means for the importance of each reason were rank-ordered and compared with the rank-order of a group of suburban community college students who had responded to the same scale in a previous study. A similar comparison was carried out by ranking the sizes of the correlations between each reason for absenteeism and the number of reported absences. Analysis confirms the external validity of the scale. Specific reasons yielding both high and low intersample discrepancies were cited and discussed along with directions for research.