There were two primary aims of the present study. First, to propose and test a full preliminary causal path model and a reduced model regarding the factors influencing academic achievement in 110 children diagnosed with insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM). The paths within the models represented the hypothesized relations between demographic variables, disease-related variables, IQ, a child's report of negative life events, as well as school absences and the association of these variables with academic performance. After testing the models using EQS (Bentler, 1992), it was found that both the full and reduced models demonstrated adequate goodness of fit to the data. No significant difference was found between the two models, however, it was concluded that the reduced model more parsimoniously described the data. The secondary aim of this study was to determine if demographic variables including race, SES, family structure, gender, and age would be more powerful predictors of academic achievement for control children (N = 114) than diabetic children (N = 110), because of the possible moderating influence of the disease-related variables for the latter group. A significant moderating relationship in academic performance was found between race, SES, gender, as well as diabetic status, and control children performed significantly higher on the academic achievement measures than children with diabetes. A thorough interpretation of the results along with future research directions are discussed, as well as potential implications of this investigation
