Abstract:

In every society for which we have data, students’ educational achievement is positively correlated with parents' socio-economic status (Björklund & Salvanes, 2011). Nevertheless, studies on the effect of socio-economic status (SES) on students’ achievement have produced different and sometimes contradictory results when different measures of SES have been used (Sirin, 2005). Even if most of the existing indices are based on similar information, the indicators selected to construct the indices and the type of variables used are different and differently combined.

My research is thus two-fold: first, it is aimed at constructing a simple socio-cultural index (SC-index), based on highest parental education and occupation, two information that most of the educational surveys provides in the same format around the world; second, at quantifying how much parents’ home possession affects children’s educational attainment.

I used data collected by the Italian national institute for the evaluation of educational system (INVALSI) to measure students’ attainment and to retrieve information about parental education, occupation, and ‘home possession’ (OECD, 2015), used as proxy of income because income is not available in many countries around the world. Parental education, occupation and home possession is used by INVALSI to calculate the ESCS, an index of economic, social and cultural background (Campodifiori, Figura, Papini, & Ricci, 2010).

In my paper, the methodological and result section have been split into two parts: the first aimed at presenting the construction of index and its validation; the second aimed at quantifying the relative effect of home possession on students’ attainment in mathematics. To this end, since SC-index is based on highest parental education and occupation exactly like ESCS, a multilevel regression analysis has been performed in order to compare the relationship between students’ attainment in mathematics and both SC-index and ESCS, comparatively.
Moreover, since previous studies have already shown that SES interplays with many other students’ features (e.g., Reardon, Fahle, Kalogrides, Podolsky, & Zárate, 2019), that the intersectionality between SES and other personal students’ characteristics change depending on students’ age (Cascella, 2019), and since INVALSI calculates ESCS only at grade 5 and 10, I analysed via a multilevel regression model and compared results, at grade 5 and 10.

Results confirmed that the relationship between attainment and SC-index is similar to that attainment and ESCS thus suggesting that:
1) parental occupation and education are sufficient to quantify students’ family background;
2) income, as indirectly revealed by ‘home possession’, plays a less important role compared to parental education and occupation; and/or,
3) home possession is not enough accurate proxy of income, thus showing some room for improvement.

Our interpretative hypothesis is that the variable ‘occupation’ already includes some information about students’ family economic well-being thus making ‘home possession’ a precious but not necessary information. Further studies in countries where parent’s income is available could be helpful to untangle the knot, to understand if and how much income predicts attainment, and thus to select the most appropriate indicators that are also available in all countries, thus making educational researches employing SES really comparable across countries.

Keywords:

Socioeconomic status (SES), outcomes, SC-index,