Attendance in "open" versus "traditional" schools is shown to have small positive effects on student satisfaction with school life and student self-reliance, while differences in family authority structures are found to be of much more importance for these outcomes when student social class characteristics are statistically controlled. Two dimensions of the family authority system are defined: number of rules at home and student involvement in family decisionmaking. Both few rules and high involvement have positive effects on self-reliance, but few rules has a negative effect and high involvement a positive effect on student satisfaction with school life. Interation effects between family and school authority structures failed to appear with consistency. These results are from a survey of 5,661 students in 4 secondary grades of 16 schools, which is part of a larger two-wave study that also includes 1700 elementary school students from 23 schools. The findings are discussed in light of the previous research, which has been been restricted to variables based on social class. (Author)