Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: One of the essential issues in educational psychology is students' academic performance. It is often assumed that parents' marital compatibility positively influences their children's academic performance. On the other hand, public health is one of the most critical factors influencing family relationships and students' academic performance. One of the important issues in educational psychology is the relationship between parents' marital compatibility and students' academic performance. This relationship may have a direct or indirect effect. One of the influential factors in this relationship is students' general health, which, as a positive state of mind, can mediate between parents' marital compatibility and students' academic performance. Using the structural evaluation modeling, the present study was conducted to model the parents' marital adjustment and academic performance with the mediation of public health in secondary school students.
Methods: The present research method was descriptive–analytical of the correlation type, which was carried out by the method of structural equation modeling. The statistical population of the research was formed by secondary high school students in the city of Babol, Iran, in the academic year 2021–2022. Of them, 290 students were selected as a sample by multi–stage cluster random sampling. The participants in the research were secondary high school students of Shahid Esfahani Girls' and Imam Hussain (AS) schools in the 11th and 12th grades of Babol. The inclusion criteria were as follows: 11^th– and 12^th–grade students studying in the mentioned schools, interested in collaborating, not participating in similar ongoing research, and not receiving specific intervention or treatment. The exclusion criteria for withdrawing the subjects from the study included being outside the scope of the study, incomplete completion of the research process, unwillingness to participate fully, and outlier data in the questionnaire. Data were gathered via the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976) and the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg & Hillier, 1979), and for evaluating academic progress, we analyzed students' first–semester grade point averages. Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics, including mean and standard deviation, and inferential statistics with structural equation modeling methods in SPSS version 23 and AMOS version 22 software, at a significance level of 0.05.
Results: The results showed the direct effect of marital compatibility on academic achievement (β= 0.241, p=0.028) and general health (β= –0.327, p=0.041), as well as the direct effect of general health on academic achievement (β= –0.570, p=0.038), was significant. On the other hand, the indirect effect of parents' marital compatibility on academic achievement with the mediation of public health was significant (p=0.001, β= –0.570). The values of the goodness of fit indices indicated the good fit of the model (GFI=0.999, AGFI=0.993, CFI=0.997, χ²/df=2.675, NFI=0.998, RMSEA=0.039).
Conclusion: Based on the research results, the marital compatibility of parents with the mediation of public health affects students' academic performance.