Effects of family background characteristics on educational participation in Turkey

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2006.02.002Get rights and content

Abstract

We study family background effects on participation in primary and secondary education of children in Turkey using large representative data sets. Educational participation, especially of girls, is found to be still a major concern, with non-enrollment being especially high in the countryside and the eastern part of the country. Parental education, number of siblings, household income, occupation of the father, traditionality of the mother and the mother's ability to speak Turkish are major factors affecting participation. For primary participation of girls, having a mother who has completed primary education and who can speak Turkish is most significant. Traditional gender role attitudes of the mother reduce the girl's chances to get secondary education. For participation of boys, the economic situation of the household is important. Findings indicate that a key role is played by the mothers of the children who are out of school. Reaching this group of mostly illiterate and traditional women is a major challenge for policy makers wanting to improve the situation.

Introduction

The level of schooling in Turkey is still rather low. In the countryside and the eastern part of the country, there are many women who did not even complete primary education (UNESCO, 2003; Ministry of Education, 2000). In the last decades, major efforts have been made to improve educational participation in the country. However, the number of children not enrolled in education remains still rather high, especially at the secondary and tertiary level (Tansel, 2002; Aytac and Rankin, 2004; Hoşgör and Smits, 2006). Table 1 shows that as recently as 2004, total net primary enrollment was 90% and net secondary enrollment no more than 50.5%. The figures for boys are higher than for girls, but also of them a substantial number was not enrolled in primary education and more than half was not enrolled in secondary education. With regard to the disparity in educational level between boys and girls, there has been little improvement over the last decade. In the 2003/2004 education for all (EFA) global monitoring report (UNESCO, 2003), Turkey was mentioned as one of the 12 countries (among 128 studied) who were expected to reach neither for primary nor for secondary education the EFA goal of gender parity by the year 2015.

Given the increasing importance of education for getting a decent job, the low level of schooling of many women makes them economically dependent on their male family members. As most women without education are not able to read and sometimes do not even speak the country's dominant language, they also depend on the male family members for their contact with and information about the outside world. As a result, these women may play an important role in the reproduction of the prevailing values—including the values which stress a subordinate position of women—to the next generation (Armstrong and Armstrong, 1994; Hoşgör and Smits, 2006). Attempts to change the traditional value patterns in this country will not be very successful, if the horizon of these women is not widened and their dependency not diminished. An important way to do this is by increasing the women's level of schooling. However, policies directed at increasing the educational level of women can only be effective if they are based on a thorough understanding of the factors by which their school enrollment and completion is furthered or hindered. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this understanding by presenting new empirical findings regarding the participation in primary and secondary education of children in Turkey.

In the following sections we first present information on the historical developments regarding (women's) education in Turkey and we give some information on the Turkish educational system. After that, we derive hypotheses about effects of socio-economic, cultural, demographic and geographic factors on educational participation. In the empirical part of the paper, first the trend in enrollment of Turkish girls and boys aged 7–14 over the period 1978–1998 is determined. Then we study for the year 1998 the variation in participation according to socio-economic, demographic and cultural family (background) characteristics and according to region and degree of urbanization. In this section, besides bivariate cross-tabulations, also multivariate logistic regression analyses are used to gain insight into the relative importance of the various background characteristics in explaining educational participation. In the last section of the empirical part, an overview is given of the most distinguishing characteristics of the group of children who are not in school. We end the paper with a concluding section in which the major findings and their implications are discussed and a number of policy measures aimed at improving the situation are formulated.

Section snippets

Background

After the Turkish Republic was established in 1923, education became an important issue for the new Kemalist government that required to transform the nation into a secular, modern, and industrial state (Jayawardene, 1986, Moghadam, 1993). In order to build up an efficient public educational system, the entire educational network was placed under political control (Winter, 1984). As women were considered central to the success of the new secular and modernizing ideology, there was special

Socio-economic characteristics

According to human capital theory, participation in education is an investment in human capital made because of the expected returns later in life (Becker, 1964). In the case of young children in developing countries, the investment decision is generally made by the parents. They are expected to trade off the future benefits of sending their children to school against the immediate costs. Those benefits can be for the child, but also for the parents themselves, because in the absence of pension

Data and methods

The data used for our analyses are from the 1978 Turkish Fertility Survey (TFS) and the 1998 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS, 1999; DHS+, 2006). These surveys use nationally representative samples of households and consist of at least a household survey and a women's survey. To make our analyses possible, we combined the family background information from the women's surveys with the children's educational information collected in the household surveys. Most analyses are based on

Participation in education

Fig. 1 shows the percentages of girls and boys who had never been in school in 1978 and 1998, according to children's age. The figure starts at age 7, because most of the interviews were held in August and September. At that time of the year, the first school year of the new cohort of six-year old children had not yet started in Turkey. Therefore, the first age group that could have been in school completely was the group of 7-year olds at the time of the interview. Fig. 1 shows, however, that

Conclusions

Educational participation of children is still an important concern in Turkey. Although enrollment rates rose considerably in the last decades, still a substantial number of school-aged children do not participate in primary or secondary education. The problem is especially severe at the secondary level, where, as recently as 1998, more than half of the girls and one-third of the boys aged 13–14 in our data were not in school. But also at the primary level enrollment is not complete, with about

References (36)

  • G. Becker

    Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education

    (1964)
  • P. Blau et al.

    The American Occupational Structure

    (1967)
  • P.M. Blood et al.

    Husbands and Wives. The Dynamics of Married Living

    (1960)
  • C. Buchmann et al.

    Education and stratification in developing countries

    Annual Review of Sociology

    (2001)
  • D. Chernichovski

    Socioeconomic and demographic aspects of school enrollment and attendance in rural Botswana

    Economic Development and Cultural Change

    (1985)
  • DHS+, 2006. About DHS+ surveys and research. Available from:...
  • E. Doğramacı

    Türkiye’de Kadının Dünü ve Bugünü

    (1992)
  • Hancıoğlu, A.G., Koç, İ., Dayıoğlu, M., 2000. The Status of Children and Women in Turkey: Perspectives in the Context...
  • Cited by (81)

    • Parental chronic illness and child education: Evidence from children in Indonesia

      2020, International Journal of Educational Development
    • Ethnic fractionalization, conflict and educational development in Turkey

      2019, International Journal of Educational Development
      Citation Excerpt :

      Indeed, Banerjee and Iyer (2005) for India and Wegenast (2010) for Brazil and Kourtellos et al. (2013) in a cross-country study show that higher land inequality reduces enrolment rates. High land inequality could also be an impediment on school enrolment in Turkey, as Kırdar (2009); Smits and Gündüz-Hoşgör (2006) and Ferreira and Gignoix (2013) show that the level of wealth significantly influences enrolment of both girls and boys in Turkey. Second, high land inequality might lead to underinvestment in public education.

    • The motherhood wage penalty in Turkey

      2022, New Perspectives on Turkey
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text