Parents' socioeconomic status and children's academic ... - Nova

Summary
The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between parents’
socioeconomic status and their children’s performance at school. Proxies
used for parents’ socioeconomic status are their educational level,
employment and cultural background; and for children’s educational
attainment, their grades in Norwegian, maths and English. The data were
collected in the second round of the longitudinal project ‘Children’s level of
living – the impact of family incomes” (Barns levekår – betydningen av
familiens inntekt). A case sample was composed of children in families who
lived below the poverty line in 2000, while a control group comprised all
categories in the community in the same year. The poverty threshold was
defined as 60 per cent of the median income. Here a subset of 499 pupils at
lower secondary education is analyzed, 388 of them are in the case sample
and 111 in the control group. They are aged 3 to 15, and are between their
eight and tenth year of schooling. Fifty-nine per cent of the pupils in the case
sample are native Norwegians, 15 per cent are western immigrants, 18 per
cent are non-western immigrants, and 9 per cent are ‘mixed’, with one
Norwegian and one immigrant parent.
The analysis methods used are cross tabulation and ‘small population
proportion’ and regression. Most parents in the case sample have a secondary
level education, and the education level of the fathers was slightly higher than
that of the mothers. Both parents in the control group have on average a
higher education than those in the case sample. The association between
parental education level and children’s academic performance was moderate
in the case sample.
Eighty-two per cent of the fathers (N=284) and 62 per cent of the
mothers (N=369) in the case sample were employed, while employment in
the control group was 85 per cent (N=103) for the mothers and 94 per cent
(N= 90) for the fathers. The analysis shows a positive association between the
children’s school grades and their parents’ labour market status.
– Parents’ socioeconomic status and children’s academic performance – 7