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Competition in the Family: Inequality between Siblings and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Advantage

By on May 17, 2018 in Articles

Michael Grätz

Sociological Science, May 17, 2018
10.15195/v5.a11

Abstract
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Research on educational mobility is concerned with inequalities between families. Differences in innate abilities and parental responses lead, however, to educational differences between siblings. If parental responses vary by family socioeconomic background, within-family inequality can affect between-family inequality (i.e., educational mobility). This study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to test whether sibling similarity in education varies by family socioeconomic background. In addition, I test whether the effects of birth order, birth spacing, and maternal age on education vary by family background. Results show that sibling similarity in education is similar in low– and high–socioeconomic status families. The negative influences of a higher birth order and a younger maternal age on educational attainment, however, are concentrated in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. These findings suggest that socioeconomically advantaged families do not generally compensate for ability differences between their children but that they compensate for disadvantageous life events.
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Michael Grätz: Nuffield College, University of Oxford; Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
E-mail: michael.gratz@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: I thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for supporting my research through a PhD scholarship. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 320116 for the research project FamiliesAndSocieties. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the European Consortium for Sociological Research conference in Tilburg, the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Boston, the ISA RC28 on Social Stratification and Mobility meeting in Budapest, the SOEP User Conference in Berlin, and at workshops in Zürich and Berlin. For their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript, I would like to thank Tina Baier, Fabrizio Bernardi, Diederik Boertien, Andrés Cardona, Dalton Conley, Juho Härkönen, Anne Christine Holtmann, and Florencia Torche.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Grätz, Michael. 2018. “Competition in the Family: Inequality between Siblings and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Advantage.” Sociological Science 5: 246-269.
  • Received: December 19, 2017
  • Accepted: April 2, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a11

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Grandparent Effects on Educational Outcomes: A Systematic Review

By on February 21, 2018 in Articles

Lewis R. Anderson, Paula Sheppard, Christiaan W. S. Monden

Sociological Science, February 21, 2018
DOI 10.15195/v5.a6

Abstract
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Are educational outcomes subject to a “grandparent effect”? We comprehensively and critically review the growing literature on this question. Fifty-eight percent of 69 analyses report that grandparents’ (G1) socioeconomic characteristics are associated with children’s (G3) educational outcomes, independently of the characteristics of parents (G2). This is not clearly patterned by study characteristics, except sample size. The median ratio of G2:G1 strength of association with outcomes is 4.1, implying that grandparents matter around a quarter as much as parents for education. On average, 30 percent of the bivariate G1–G3 association remains once G2 information is included. Grandparents appear to be especially important where G2 socioeconomic resources are low, supporting the compensation hypothesis. We further discuss whether particular grandparents matter, the role of assortative mating, and the hypothesis that G1–G3 associations should be stronger where there is (more) G1–G3 contact, for which repeated null findings are reported. We recommend that measures of social origin include information on grandparents.

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Lewis R. Anderson: Trinity College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Email: lewis.anderson@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Paula Sheppard: Nuffield College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Email: paula.sheppard@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Christiaan W. S. Monden: Nuffield College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Email: christiaan.monden@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Patrick Präg for his many useful comments and suggestions, to Guido Neidhöfer for sharing with us the results of his literature search, and to the participants of the Multigenerational Social Mobility Workshop held at Nuffield College, University of Oxford on September 21 and 22, 2017, for their comments. This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement number 681546 (FAMSIZEMATTERS).

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Anderson, Lewis R., Paula Sheppard, and Christiaan W. S. Monden. 2018. “Grandparent Effects on Educational Outcomes: A Systematic Review.” Sociological Science 5: 114-142.
  • Received: November 3, 2017
  • Accepted: January 6, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a6

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More than Money: Social Class, Income, and the Intergenerational Persistence of Advantage

By on April 5, 2017 in Articles

Carina Mood

Sociological Science, April 5, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a12

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I provide a uniquely comprehensive empirical integration of the sociological and economic approaches to the intergenerational transmission of advantage. I analyze the independent and interactive associations that parental income and social class share with children’s later earnings, using large-scale Swedish register data with matched parent–child records that allow exact and reliable measurement of occupations and incomes. I show that parental class matters at a given income and income matters within a given social class, and the net associations are substantial. Because measurement error is minimal, this result strongly suggests that income and class capture partly different underlying advantages and transmission mechanisms. If including only one of these measures, rather than both, we underestimate intergenerational persistence by around a quarter. The nonlinearity of the income–earnings association is found to be largely a compositional effect capturing the main effect of class.

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Carina Mood: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University
Email: carina.mood@sofi.su.se

Acknowledgements: I have benefited from helpful comments from members of the Level-of-Living team at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, and in particular from detailed comments given by Per Engzell, Robert Erikson, Michael Gähler, Jan O. Jonsson, and Georg Treuter.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Mood, Carina. 2017. “More than Money: Social Class, Income, and the Intergenerational Persistence of Advantage.” Sociological Science 4: 263-287.
  • Received: January 3, 2017
  • Accepted: February 21, 2017
  • Editors: Jesper B. Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v4.a12


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Persistent Educational Advantage Across Three Generations: Empirical Evidence for Germany

By on December 12, 2016 in Articles

Andrea Ziefle

Sociological Science, December 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a47

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This article uses survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to analyze the persistence of educational attainment across three generations in Germany. I obtain evidence of a robust effect of grandparents’ education on respondents’ own educational attainment in West Germany, net of parental class, education, occupational status, family income, parents’ relationship history, and family size. I also test whether the grandparent effect results from resource compensation or cumulative advantage and find empirical support for both mechanisms. In comparison, the intergenerational association between grandparents’ and respondents’ education is considerably weaker in East Germany and is also mediated completely by parental education. There are hardly any gender differences in the role of grandparents for respondents’ educational attainment, except for the fact that resource compensation is found to be exclusively relevant for women’s attainment in both West Germany and in East Germany after German reunification and the associated transition to an open educational system.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrea Ziefle: School of Social Sciences (FB03), Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main
Email: aziefle@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Acknowledgements: The data from the German Socio-Economic Panel survey have kindly been made available by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. DIW bears no responsibility for the uses made of the data in the analyses reported in the present manuscript. This research has been supported by a research grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG) to the author for her project, “Family background and women’s changing life courses” (ZI 1495/1-1). I thank Markus Gangl for valuable comments on my work.


Supplemental Material


  • Citation: Ziefle, Andrea. 2016. “Persistent Educational Advantage Across Three Generations: Empirical Evidence for Germany.” Sociological Science 3: 1077-1102.
  • Received: September 14, 2016
  • Accepted: October 6, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a47


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