Push/Pull Dynamics As Conditioners of School Retention and Abandonment: Analysis of Survey Results in the School Population of Castile and León

The European Union through EUROSTAT defines early school leaving as the percentage of young people aged 18 to 24 who are not studying and who do not have a higher than compulsory education. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted by 1106 students attending the 4^th grade of secondary public and private schools during the months of October and November in 2015 in Castile and León. The push and pull theory, which inspired the design of the questionnaire, groups the variables as expulsion and attraction factors. The questionnaire includes 55 items that have to do with factors that determine abandonment. The immediate consequence is the proposal of 16 factors of expulsion/attraction, the consequence of the reduction of the items. Once this reduction was made, a logistic regression was developed to predict a categorical variable depending on independent or predictor variables. The results determine that the three factors with the highest incidence in the decision to leave are the ones that correspond to the attraction of work, problems of coexistence and parental pressure.

The conclusion of the binary logistic regression analysis is the balance between expulsion and attraction factors, with a certain advantage of the factors of attraction towards the labor context and a protagonism of the cohabitation aspects as expellers.