Teachers’ compassionate love, teachers’ esteem and students’ attitudes towards the justice system: The mediating role of school belonging

ABSTRACT Adolescents with positive attitudes towards the legal authorities are unlikely to adopt delinquent behaviours. To examine the role school can play in shaping such attitudes, we questioned 465 middle school students to assess how their emotional relationships with teachers (teachers’ compassionate love, teachers’ esteem) relate to their attitudes towards authority (trust in the justice system, positive evaluation of the law). We also assessed whether these associations were mediated by school belonging. Results showed that teachers’ compassionate love and teachers’ esteem were (respectively) directly and indirectly linked to students’ attitudes towards authority. In both cases, school belonging acted as either a partial or a total mediator. This is consistent with the group engagement model and suggests that students’ attitudes towards legal authorities are linked to their affective relationships with teachers, partly because their positive perceptions of teacher-student relationships strengthen their feelings of school membership.