Educational Decision-Making: The Significance of Class and Context

• Main Author: Strømme, Thea Bertnes
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: Class contexts; Classes; Educational decisions; Educational systems; Psykologi: 260; Relational processes; Samfunnsgeografi: 290; Samfunnsvitenskap: 200; Sosial- og arbeidspsykologi: 263; Survey data; VDP

This thesis investigates whether and how classed educational decisions occur in different contexts. Using international comparative survey and Norwegian register data, I examine the decision-making processes at different levels of the education system; I do so through a theoretical focus on the composition of capital and contextualized closure. Through four articles, I investigate the association between class and educational decisions within the contexts of the family, school, specific educational fields and nationally. An operationalization of class that distinguishes between levels of cultural and economic forms of capital but that also includes the more usual vertical distinction contributes additional knowledge. In the first article, co-authored with Håvard Helland, we investigate the association between cultural and economic resources in the family and two different forms of parental involvement in education. Using survey data from Ghent in Belgium, Barcelona in Spain, Reykjavik in Iceland and Bergen in Norway, we find that parental involvement in current schooling is associated with parents’ levels of economic resources, whereas future educational expectations are largely associated with the level of cultural resources in the family. The national differences did not suggest that school system characteristics played an important role in the correlations between resources and involvement; however, both Iceland and Spain stood out in that economic resources played a more important role in parental involvement. The aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 may be an explanation for this. In the second article, I investigate the association between the classed compositions of lower secondary schools and whether academic or vocational tracks are chosen at upper secondary schools in Norway. By using Norwegian register data that encompass 11 cohorts of the population and by using multilevel and school fixed effects methods, I show that the proportion of upper-class pupils at lower secondary schools is associated with a greater likelihood of choosing academic tracks at upper secondary level; this is particularly true of students who themselves are not from upper-class backgrounds. Classed segregation patterns and classed socialisation at school seem to have an impact on individual decisions. This suggests that the ‘classed’ nature of educational decision-making is also embedded in contexts beyond familial ones. The third article is co-authored with Marianne