Both parents matter. Family-based educational inequality in Italy over the second half of the 20th century

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2021.100597Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Research on educational inequality should include both father’s and mother’s status in the measurement of social origins.

  • The “dominance” coding, currently used by most researchers, shows the best fit among single-parent coding.

  • All codings including both parents give a better fit than single-parent codings.

  • Codings of social origins including and distinguishing both parents show a clearer decrease of inequality over cohorts than single-parent models.

Abstract

Research on educational inequalities, as well as social stratification research in general, has since long conceptualized and operationalized social origins using parental status, in particular their occupational position and/or educational achievement. The theoretical rationale is that an individual’s social position depends on his/her household. As a matter of fact, often in actual research practice only paternal characteristics have been used, either on theoretical grounds or using the so-called “dominance” coding. Such a practice is not tenable today, when women systematically outperform men in educational achievement and where their labour market partecipation has dramatically raised. The paper shows how father-based and single-parent codings systematically bias the estimates of inequality of educational opportunities (IEO), particularly concerning its trend over time. It studies systematically how different codings of social origins, by including or excluding relevant information, change the empirical results of models of IEO for the Italian case. It uses survey data from three waves (1998, 2003 and 2008) of the MultiPurpose Survey carried out by the Italian National Institute for Statistics (Istat), in order to compare the fit and the parameters estimates for the association between parental education and educational achievement of a set of logit models of IEO and of its trend over time, where different measurement strategies of social origin, as indexed by parental education, are used. This is done for two school transitions, namely achieving at least upper secondary and achieving tertiary, including all post-secondary titles. We also compare the magnitude of the effect of parental social class and education, confirming the latter to be stronger than the former. Results show that models where social origin is measured including information concerning both parents reproduce the data better than models relying on one parent only. The dominance approach underestimates the association between parental education and respondent's education when parents have a similar educational title, while it overestimates it when a wider education gap is found between parents. In particular, a “full interaction” coding, exploiting all available information by considering all combinations of maternal and paternal education, provides the best fit for models of the transition to upper secondary education, while concerning the transition to a tertiary title the “reduced interaction” coding, which does not consider the dominant parent in non-homogamic parental couples, is statistically equivalent to the full interaction one. Our analysis shows that including both parents significantly changes the resulting evidence concerning the trend of IEO over cohorts: models using the interacted coding of social origin, exploiting all available information, show a clearer picture of a declining IEO over time, this decrease being mostly determined by the offspring of low-educated parents and of those parental couples where the maternal educational level is dominant with respect to the paternal one.

Introduction

While early stratification research was optimistic concerning the possibility to achieve equal opportunities in education (Blau & Duncan, 1967), to this day empirical evidence is not fully consistent in either supporting or disconfirming definitely the effectiveness of education as a channel of social mobility, because of the persisting association between family background and school achievement, or inequality of educational opportunities (henceforth IEO) (Blossfeld, Blossfeld, & Blossfeld, 2016, 2017; Breen & Jonsson, 2005). Among the many reasons underlying such an uncertainty there is the definition of the family background itself, that is the measurement of social origin. For long stratification research has relied on the education and/or occupation of the father, or of the highest-ranking parent. As a more recent literature underlines, including information concerning both parents in the measurement of social origin is necessary for at least three reasons: (i) mothers matter for educational achievement, at the very least because on average they spend more time with children than fathers (Acker, 1973); (ii) omitting mothers biases the measurement of family background, since it assumes homogamy (Tach, 2015); (iii) this bias is particularly relevant for analyses of IEO over time, as rates of homogamy change over cohorts (Beller, 2009).

We contribute to this growing literature by systematically checking for the Italian case how estimates of IEO and its trend over time do change if we include both parents in the measurement of social origins. Italy is characterized by relatively low female employment (Del Boca & Giraldo, 2013) and relatively strong gender cleavages in the family (Dotti Sani, 2014), so that lack of attention to gender in the measurement of social origin might produce a strong bias. Using a large data set, we systematically compared logit estimates of IEO in Italy and of its trend over time, where different measurement strategies of social origin were used. We did this for two school transitions, namely achieving at least upper secondary and at least tertiary titles. Our measurement strategy was based on parental education, but results were robust to a control for parental social class.

Section snippets

Mothers do matter

Since the 60 s, stratification scholars have measured social origin, defined as family background, using either parental occupation or education. However, in both North American status attainment research and European class analysis, family background has been routinely indexed either only by information concerning the father, or adopting the so-called “dominance” approach, considering the highest-ranking between the two parents (Erikson, 1984). In this section we review criticisms of both

The relative weight of parental education and occupation

Our first hypothesis concerns the impact of different indicators of parental resources on school achievement. The key relevant theoretical assumption, widely shared in the literature, is that family class background indicates economic resources, albeit in a wide sense, since occupation relates to income, while parental education indicates information and cultural and motivational resources typically acquired in school, and particularly useful to support the educational achievement of children (

Data

We pooled data from three Istat Surveys on Family and Childhood, a repeated cross-section survey conducted in 1998, 2003, 2009 on representative samples of Italian households, including retrospective information on educational and occupational careers as well as on family background. We selected all respondents born after 1940 and aged at least 30 years at time of interview and, given the focus of our analysis, excluded one-parent families. After listwise deletion of missing data, the final

Empirical results

Our empirical analysis starts with a model estimating separately the contribution of both maternal and paternal education as predictors of school achievement. The coefficients were then used to estimate three sheaf coefficient (SC) models, displayed in Fig. 1, for the transition to upper secondary (panel a) and to tertiary education (panel b).

A first SC model (left-hand panel) compares the two parents, positing that each parent’s education and class sum up (i.e., form a latent variable) and

Conclusion

This paper addressed inequality of educational opportunities (IEO) by parental education in Italy and its trend over time, by means of logit models of the probability to achieve an upper secondary and a tertiary title, systematically including both parents in the measurement of social origin. In this way, the measurement of social origin was made more consistent with stratification theory, which stresses the key unit for social stratification to be the family, while the usual operationalization

References (81)

  • G. Ballarino et al.

    La disuguaglianza delle opportunità educative in Italia, 1930-1980: tendenze e cause

    Polis

    (2008)
  • G. Ballarino et al.

    Genere, origine sociale e disuguaglianza di istruzione nell’Italia contemporanea

    Sociologia del lavoro

    (2010)
  • G. Ballarino et al.

    Origini sociali e occupazione in Italia

    Rassegna italiana di sociologia

    (2016)
  • G. Ballarino et al.

    Persistent inequalities? Expansion of education and class inequality in Italy and Spain

    European Sociological Review

    (2009)
  • F. Barigozzi et al.

    The gender gap in informal child care: Theory and some evidence from Italy

    (2019)
  • C. Barone et al.

    Educational equalization stalled? Trends in inequality of educational opportunity between 1930 and 1980 across 26 European nations

    European Societies

    (2018)
  • C. Barone et al.

    Elogio dei grandi numeri: il lento declino delle disuguaglianze delle opportunità di istruzione in Italia

    Polis

    (2010)
  • E. Beller

    Bringing intergenerational social mobility research into the twenty-first century: Why mothers matter

    American Sociological Review

    (2009)
  • F. Bernardi

    Who marries whom in Italy?

  • T.J. Biblarz et al.

    Family structure and social mobility

    Social Forces

    (1997)
  • P. Blau et al.

    The American occupational structure

    (1967)
  • H.P. Blossfeld

    Linked lives in modern societies. The impact on social inequality of increasing educational homogamy and the shift towards dual-earner couples

  • P.N. Blossfeld et al.

    Changes in educational inequality in Cross-national perspective

  • P.N. Blossfeld et al.

    The speed of educational expansion and changes in inequality of educational opportunity

  • R. Breen et al.

    Explaining educational differentials: Towards a formal rational action theory

    Rationality and Society

    (1997)
  • R. Breen et al.

    Inequality of opportunity in comparative perspective: Recent research on educational attainment and social mobility

    Annual Review of Sociology

    (2005)
  • R. Breen et al.

    Conclusions

  • R. Breen et al.

    Education and intergenerational social mobility in Europe and the United States

    (2020)
  • R. Breen et al.

    Non persistent inequality in educational attainment: Evidence from eight European countries

    The American Journal of Sociology

    (2009)
  • R. Breen et al.

    Long-term trends in educational inequality in Europe: Class inequalities and gender differences

    European Sociological Review

    (2010)
  • M.L. Buis

    The composition of family background: The influence of the economic and cultural resources of both parents on the offspring’s educational attainment

    European Sociological Review

    (2013)
  • E. Bukodi et al.

    Decomposing ‘social origin’: The effects of parents’ class, status, and education on the educational attainment of their children

    European Sociological Review

    (2013)
  • E. Bukodi et al.

    Linking the macro to the micro: A multidimensional approach to educational inequalities in four European countries

    European Societies

    (2018)
  • A. Cobalti et al.

    Inequality of educational opportunity in Italy

  • D. Conley

    Bringing sibling differences in: Enlarging our understanding of the transmission of advantage in families

  • D. Contini et al.

    Social origin inequalities in educational careers in Italy. Performance or decision effects?

  • R. Crompton

    Class and family

    The Sociological Review

    (2006)
  • A. Dale et al.

    Integrating women into class theory

    Sociology

    (1985)
  • Cited by (11)

    • Cognitive ability has powerful, widespread and robust effects on social stratification: Evidence from the 1979 and 1997 US National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth

      2022, Intelligence
      Citation Excerpt :

      To provide simpler interpretations of the relationships of wealth with other variables, measures of ‘positive wealth’ were constructed which exclude zero and negative values. Parents' education tends to have stronger associations than other socioeconomic indicators on their offspring's educational and occupational attainment (Hällsten & Thaning, 2018; Blossfeld, 2019, p. 1352; Ballarino, Meraviglia, & Panichella, 2021). Both the NLSY79 and NLSY97 collected data on highest grade ever completed for father's and mother's education.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text