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Can children break the cycle of disadvantage? Structure and agency in the transmission of education across generations

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Abstract

Research has shown that parents tend to pass educational advantage or disadvantage on to their children. However, little is known about the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of education involves children’s agency. In this study we drew from two traditions in sociological and social psychological theorizing—the theory of cultural and social reproduction and the theory of human agency—to examine whether agency influences children’s educational performance, and if so, whether this influence can be observed among children across social classes. We used data from the Spanish sample of the Program for International Student Assessment (N = 25,003 15-year-olds). Results indicate that the level of child agency was weakly positively related to social class, that child agency impacted on a child’s educational performance, and that the positive effect of agency on educational performance did not vary by social class. This suggests that strategies to enhance disadvantaged children’s agency may prove useful in reducing social gradients in educational performance. More generally, our findings may ignite a debate about the role that social structure and human agency play in shaping social inequality and mobility.

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Notes

  1. Previous studies indicated somewhat stronger associations between parental education and children’s educational performance (e.g., Schlicht et al. 2010; Stadelmann-Steffen 2012). However, this can be explained by the fact that these studies measured parental education on an ordinal scale, using ISCED categories rather than the number of years of completed full-time schooling.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre interfacultaire en droits de l’Enfant, Université de Genève (Valais Campus), Case postale 4176, 1950, Sion 4, Switzerland

    Kaspar Burger

  2. Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA

    Marlene Walk

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  1. Kaspar Burger
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  2. Marlene Walk
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Correspondence to Kaspar Burger.

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Appendix 1

Appendix 1

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Table 4 Variables, operationalization, descriptive statistics
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Burger, K., Walk, M. Can children break the cycle of disadvantage? Structure and agency in the transmission of education across generations. Soc Psychol Educ 19, 695–713 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9361-y

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