Socioeconomic status has long been believed to play a crucial role in the academic success of youngsters. Research from the University of Gothenburg suggests, however, that the current composite index is not as effective a predictor as looking at the various individual components, such as the number of books in a home or the parents’ occupation, that typically make up one’s socioeconomic status.
The researchers argue that when individual factors are lumped together to form a general socioeconomic status it can result in key gaps being omitted that can help us better understand gaps in education. They believe that the best approach to understanding socioeconomic status is as a multidimensional predictor, with each variable weighted differently based upon individual cultures.
Educational attainment
The researchers assessed data from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with around 600,000 students from 77 countries analyzed. As with other assessments, the PISA process treats socioeconomic status as a single metric alongside other variables, such as class size, when they try to predict student outcomes. When the status was broken down into six component variables, however, a number of discoveries emerged.
“Our main finding is that relations between student achievement and socioeconomic factors look very different in different countries,” the researchers say. “In many countries, achievement is strongly related to the number of books at home while it is unrelated, or even negatively related, to wealth.”
The occupational status of children’s parents was also a key predictor of their educational success. What’s more, these findings were consistent across academic domains. For instance, the finding that books at home were a key indicator of success was just as strong in science as it was in reading.
“This points to a fundamental problem with the current approach, in which socioeconomic status is measured by some fixed index of socioeconomic factors,” the researchers say. “For example, this practice will inevitably underestimate the socioeconomic achievement gap in countries where the index does not match the actual importance of different socioeconomic factors.”
Simple measurement
The authors argue that while it may be possible to establish a single-dimensional index, this should be customized for different countries. For instance, the use of books at home or parents’ occupational status works well in higher-income countries, but less so in lower-income countries.
As to why things like the number of books in the house were so important, the researchers suggest it was less to do with any direct causation per se as it is about the indication to children that reading is both enjoyable and interesting, which can help to transfer valuable traits to their children.
“We believe that the mystery disappears if we instead assume that socioeconomic factors are mainly indicators of individual traits that are useful to achieve in school and that to some extent are transferred from parents to children,” the researchers conclude.
