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