Session Information
09 SES 05 C, Social Disparities in Education (Part 2)
Paper Session
Contribution
International studies of student assessment reveal a strong connection between the socioeconomic status (SES) of families and the educational success of their children in all participating countries (Willms, 2006). Therefore the analysis of SES is an important issue – in sociology as well as in the fields of educational research.
The common theoretical framework for measuring SES in educational research is the distinction between economic, cultural, and social capital proposed by Bourdieu (1986). Routine measures for these theoretical constructs are household possessions (e.g., books at home), cultural activities (e.g., visits to a theatre), educational attainment and occupational status of the parents (e.g., ISCED and ISEI), and household income (cf. for an overview e.g., Bos, Stubbe, & Buddeberg, 2010). Nevertheless, most of these indicators focus cultural and/or economic capital – but disregard social capital. If at all the relation between parents and children is used to quantify the social capital within the family (cf. Coleman, 1988).
The difficulty measuring social capital is that the amount of a family’s social capital is defined by the aggregated capital in the social network of this family (Bourdieu, 1986). Therefore, the straightforward way would be to collect the SES of all persons in this network. Apparently this is not an option in large scale studies as the number of person to be surveyed would multiply by the number of social relations of an average family.
However, based on this concept of accessible capital in the social network of a person several scales have been developed in sociological research – most prominent the position generator and the resource generator. The position generator (Lin, & Dumin, 1986) presents a list of twenty occupations and asks for each item whether someone in the household knows someone with this job or not. Using indices of job prestige the range of accessed prestige, the highest accessed prestige, and the number of different positions accessed can be estimated. The resource generator (van der Gaag, & Snijders, 2005) generalizes this approach by asking for 37 items whether someone in the household knows someone with a certain characteristic or talent.
In the Netherlands van der Gaag and Snijders (2005) test the resource generator and find four distinct domains of social capital. They point out that “these social capital measures cannot be explained by sociodemographic group membership, and are therefore indicators that tell a different story than demographic variables” (van der Gaag, & Snijders, 2005, p. 17).
This leads to the central research questions for this paper: Does social capital – measured with the resource (respectively position) generator – provides additional explanatory power to the analysis of student achievement when the common indicators for SES are included? And more precisely: Does social capital explain differences in the achievement of children with similar cultural and economic background?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bos, W., Stubbe, T. C., & Buddeberg, M. (2010). Gibt es eine armutsbedingte Bildungsbenachteiligung? Die Operationalisierung verschiedener Indikatoren der sozialen Herkunft in der empirischen Bildungsforschung [Is there an educational disadvantage caused by poverty? The operationalization of different indicators for social origin in empirical educational research]. In D. H. Rost (Ed.), Intelligenz, Hochbegabung, Vorschulerziehung, Bildungsbeteiligung [Intelligence, giftedness, pre-primary education, educational disadvantage] (pp. 165–208). Münster: Waxmann. Bos, W., Stubbe, T. C., Buddeberg, M., Dohe, C., Kasper, D., & Walzebug, A. (2011). Framework for the Panel Study at the Research School ‚Education and Capabilities’ in North Rhine-Westphalia (PARS). Manuscript in preparation. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory of research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood Press. Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–120. Lin, N., & Dumin, M. (1986). Access to occupations through social ties. Social Networks, 8, 365–385. Mokken, R. J. (1996). Nonparametric models for dichotomous responses. In W. J. van der Linden & R. K. Hambleton (Eds.), Handbook of modern item response theory (pp. 351–367). New York, NY: Springer. Van der Gaag, M., & Snijders, T. A. B. (2005). The resource generator: social capital quantification with concrete items. Social Networks, 27, 1–29. Willms, J. D. (2006). Learning divides: ten policy questions about the performance and equity of schools and schooling systems. Montreal, Canada: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
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