Family dynamics and educational outcomes for primary level

The concept of poverty is multidimensional. The variables chosen for defining the multidimensional concept of poverty and grouped into housing, occupation, education, food security, access to financial institutions and beneficiary programme along with factor. First, a composite wealth index will be computed using PCA on a set of 12 variables, covering above broad areas. Poverty experienced by individuals and households for extended periods of time or throughout their entire lives is called chronic poverty .The data on chronic poverty is sparse and, mainly depends on panel data, at two point of time with a number of variables on economic and social dimension. Understanding the need, one of the major contributions of this research is to define a methodology to identify the poor, and particularly the chronic poor. Third, along with the classification of poor, perception of poor on intergenerational economic status, that is, how the household perceive the economic condition compared to his/her parents, will adopted to classify the chronic poor.

The human capital is defined as knowledge, skills, and other abilities which will lead to improvement in the quality and level of production. The capital achieved at younger ages would have stronger effects on the progress at later ages. Family has shown to have crucial influence on the achievement. Iranian families are now experiencing a low level fertility, highly educated parents, and a relatively high level of family dissolution. Using data drawn from the Time Use Survey (conducted during 2008-2009), this paper aims to examine the effects of the number of children on the achievement of human capital by young children in urban areas of Iran. Target population includes 2183 never-married children aged 15-19 years. Findings show a negative relationship between the number of children and the achievement of human capital. A sharper difference exists between families with one or two children and families with 3 and more children. Multivariate analyses show the significant effects of the sex and age of children, and the mother's level of education. The presence of such control variables, however, does not change the effect of number of children. The results can show the sustainability of low family size (two-child family) in future.

As Southern European countries have transitioned from countries of emigration to immigration, scholars have become increasingly interested in the adaptation of immigrant youth, particularly their educational achievements. However, the role of gender in defining the educational experiences and outcomes of immigrants is still almost unknown.
Our paper addresses this issue by determining whether there is a significant gender gap in educational ambitions among immigrant offspring in these two countries and if so, by examining the possible mechanisms related to familism which may drive the formation of a gender gap. We contrast Italy and Spain in order to assess whether the gender patterns in educational ambitions based on our findings are generalizable across countries of similarly recent immigration histories.

A two-stage socio-psychological analytical framework will be adopted to illuminate the relation between familial socioeconomic status and academic achievement of the students. The framework puts the emphasis to incorporate micro familial factors into macro factor of the tracking system. Initially, children of the poor families always lack major prerequisite of diminution of cognitive stimulating resources. Hence, they are very likely to be assigned to low caliber class. The diminution of cognitive stimulating resources originates from stress coping strategy of the parents, parental expectation and parenting. As students advance to upper grade, a triad nexus of expectation among parents, students and teachers help perpetuate the vicious cycle among students of poor families. Students with low socioeconomic status bore entire brunt of the tracking system in a way that they get poor academic result and a high school dropout rate.
This theoretical framework represents the very first step of the research, to be followed in the next stage by in-depth interviews with the different stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, educational academics and government officials of Hong Kong. The research will then be concluded by analyzing how the theoretical framework applies in Hong Kong.

Parental migration is found to have contrasting effects on children’s educational outcomes in countries in Asia and Latin America. Different indicators are used, which may explain some of the divergences, but this also indicates the importance of context. We examine educational outcomes among children in 3 African countries and add to the literature in several ways, by: providing information about African cases, missing in the literature; using several measures of educational outcomes to test if results differ according to indicator used; and providing a cross-country comparison, to understand the role of context-specific factors. A survey is conducted amongst junior and secondary school children in Ghana (N=2760), Angola (N=2243), and Nigeria (N=2168). Educational outcomes are measured as class repetition, level of school enjoyment among children, and an index of pupils’ marks. We control for family, child, living, and migration characteristics. We compare children in migrant and non-migrant families. Preliminary results reveal that in Ghana and Nigeria children are prone to repeat a class when their mother or both parents have migrated nationally or internationally, while in Angola the opposite is observed. Furthermore, the results find limited evidence to link material deprivation with negative educational performance.

Education is the basic requirement for human development. With education, employment opportunities are broadened and income levels are increased. Despite of governmental efforts, huge investment and many innovative programmes, the school dropout remains alarming high in many states of India. In this context, it is not only the provision of schooling facilities and quality of education, but also other household and social factors play a major role in influencing the discontinuation of education. NFHS -3 provides an opportunity to examine the school dropout, based on large nationally representative sample survey of households in Indian context. The present paper tried to understand the differentials in school dropouts for selected states and at national level. Based on the data from NFHS-3, it was found that only 75 percent of the children in the age group 6 to 16 years are currently attending school. About 14% of the children never attended the school and 11 percent dropped out of school for various reasons. The study suggests that unless and until there is considerable improvement in the economic status of households and change in the social attitudes of parents, achieving the goal of universalisation of school education will remain a major challenge for India.

This study examines the reasons for the gap in educational attainment between children from intact and non-intact families. Though parental involvement and socioeconomic resources are well-established reasons, these factors do not explain the entire relationship between family structure and educational trajectories. This study considers whether school engagement is another major explanation for the comparatively lower educational attainment of adolescents from non-intact families. The analysis follows a cohort (born 1984) from age 15 to 26 and compares their chances of university enrolment and completion. The regression analysis demonstrates that school engagement is indeed an important reason for the lower educational attainment of adolescents from non-intact families. Moreover, the decomposition analysis demonstrates that school engagement is the primary explanation for the gap in educational attainment between adolescents from different family types. School engagement explains a greater proportion of this gap than the combined influence of parental involvement, parental education, and household income.

Young people in the 21st century face the transition to adulthood in a very different way with respect to those of the same age in the 1980s. There are also wide differences across countries in the Western world. In this work we analyze the trends in the proportion of young adults working full-time, who achieved some sort of financial independence, and their living arrangements. Using the Luxemburg Income Study we look at six different countries – United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Netherlands – to give a cross-national comparison, and we compare outcomes in two points in time – mid-1980s and 2004 – to have an idea about the evolution of young adults’ behavior over decades. We find a general decreasing trend in the percentage working full-time, and earning a satisfactory level of wages. The situation is more positive for women, who are more active in the labor force in 2004 than in the mid-1980s, suggesting that males and females’ careers become more similar over time. In addition, there are differences across countries that cannot be entirely explained by structural factors and differences in labor markets, and that may be related to other aspects, like cultural and normative shifts.

This paper primarily examines the interrelationships connecting family background and students’ academic attainment. Based on the questionnaire survey conducted in 6 senior high schools in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, the sample consists of 2028 senior high school freshman.The findings suggest that the differentiation of social stratification between families in senior high school education is embodied in student’s academic attainment. The advantaged classes (such as the administrator group, the middle- manager group, and professionals and technicians group) contain significantly larger resources in economic capital, cultural capital, and parents’ emotional involvement in education than the disadvantaged (such as blue-collar worker group, skilled industrial worker group, and peddler group), which indirectly affects students’ performance in exams. A further analysis indicates the way how family structured variables, including family’s cultural capital, economic capital affect the academic achievement. Besides, this paper explores the extent to which family process variables, including parental educational expectation, family interaction, parents’ emotional engagement in education, and behavior supervision, have power to predict academic achievement between different classes.

Compulsory education policy has been widely used by economists to estimate the causal impacts of education on various outcomes. However, few have investigated the spillover effects of compulsory education on children’s siblings within a family. Using a regression discontinuity method and Hong Kong Census Data, I found that Hong Kong’s 1971 policy on free, compulsory primary education reduced the probability of early dropout by approximately 8% by age 12. The effect is substantial considering that approximately 90% of primary-school-age children were already in school in Hong Kong when the policy was implemented. The 1971 policy also reduced the probability of early dropout for the oldest brother (a 3% reduction in the dropout rate by age 12) and the oldest sister (a 5% reduction by age 12 and a 4% reduction by age 15). The impacts were larger for children in low-income families. Further, having younger brothers who benefited from free compulsory primary education did not seem to affect the oldest child’s educational attainment. However, having younger sisters who benefited from the compulsory education policy increased the educational attainment for the oldest child in the family, especially for the oldest sister.