We aim to bring together two current strands of research into inequalities in individuals’ educational attainment that are associated with their social origins: that concerned with the “primary” and “secondary” effects of social origins in creating inequalities, and that concerned with the relation between these inequalities and different components of social origins, taken to represent different forms of parental resources. Our main findings are the following. The secondary effects of social origins—their effects via the educational choices that young people make given their prior academic performance—are clearly operative across five key educational transitions within the English educational system. More specifically, we estimate that 35% of the total effect of social origins is secondary in the earliest transition that we consider, and from 15% to 20% in the subsequent four. Furthermore, mediation analyses reveal that secondary effects are most strongly associated with parental education and then, to a lesser degree with parental status, while little association exists with parental class and none at all with parental income. Primary effects are also at all transitions most strongly associated with parental education and status but in this case both parental class and parental income do retain some importance. We suggest an explanation for our empirical findings as resulting largely from the concern of highly educated, professional parents, and their children to avoid the occurrence of downward intergenerational mobility, especially in terms of education and status.

中文翻译：

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社会出身对教育程度的主要和次要影响：英格兰的新发现

我们的目标是将目前关于个人受教育程度与社会出身相关的不平等研究的两个方面结合起来：关注社会出身在创造不平等方面的“主要”和“次要”影响，以及关注与社会出身相关的“主要”和“次要”影响。这些不平等与社会出身的不同组成部分之间的差异，被用来代表不同形式的父母资源。我们的主要发现如下。的社会根源，其影响通过教育选择的辅助疗效，年轻人使给定他们之前的学业成绩——在英语教育系统中的五个关键教育转型中显然是有效的。更具体地说，我们估计社会出身总影响的 35% 在我们考虑的最早转变中是次要的，在随后的四个转变中从 15% 到 20%。此外，中介分析表明，次要效应与父母教育的相关性最强，其次与父母地位的相关程度较低，而与父母阶级几乎没有关联，与父母收入完全没有关联。主要影响也与父母教育和地位最密切相关，但在这种情况下，父母阶级和父母收入确实保持一定的重要性。