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In Lebanon, the dropout rate is high between the primary and supplementary school (theequivalent of college in France). Our goal is to identify certain psychological and socialfactors involved in the risk of dropping out. We chose Albert Bandura’s social cognitivetheory (2003) – which studied the dynamic interactions between contextual factors andindividual factors – as a framework for systematic analysis of the factors involved in the riskof dropping out.The study was conducted among 504 adolescent students (equivalent to a fifth term class inFrench college) in Lebanese public school in a poor neighborhood. Multivariate analyzesperformed on the data of our research showed that school anxiety, school learningexperiences, feelings of self-efficacy related to classroom learning, the expectations of theschool, the future intentions school and work, social support provided by family and teachers,are associated to the risk of dropping out of college in Lebanon.Our qualitative survey by individual interviews – conducted over 26 students (eight of whomhad two-school dropouts) – corroborated the quantitative data and provided additionalinformation. In addition, other factors involved in the dropout were identified and, inparticular, social representations of girls and boys on education and working life,representations that have significant involvement in their construction identity. Wehighlighted the fact that contextual factors have a little more stress than individual factors.Thus, the results for gender differences show that girls and boys seem to have the same causesthat explain the risk of dropping out.

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