Determinants of Secondary School Dropping Out: A Structural Equation Model.

In this work we present the main results of a research program on dropping out in secondary school, carried out for the Labor Bureau of Campania Region in Italy. We exploited structural equation modeling to identify determinants of the phenomenon under study. We adopt a social system perspective, considering data coming from official statistics related to the 103 Italian Provinces. We provide some details for the model specification and the estimated parameters. Some relevant issues related to the estimation process due to the small sample size and the non-normality of the variables are also discussed