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Pathways of Intergenerational Transmission of Advantages during Adolescence: Social Background, Cognitive Ability, and Educational Attainment

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

Educational attainment in adolescence is of paramount importance for attaining higher education and for shaping subsequent life chances. Sociological accounts focus on the role of differences in socioeconomic resources in intergenerational reproduction of educational inequalities. These often disregard the intergenerational transmission of cognitive ability and the importance of children’s cognitive ability to educational attainment. Psychological perspectives stress the importance of cognitive ability for educational attainment but underemphasize potentially different roles of specific socioeconomic resources in shaping educational outcomes, as well as individual differences in cognitive ability. By integrating two strands of research, a clearer picture of the pathways linking the family of origin, cognitive ability, and early educational outcomes can be reached. Using the population-based TwinLife study in Germany, we investigated multidimensional pathways linking parental socioeconomic position to their children’s cognitive ability and academic track attendance in the secondary school. The sample included twins (N = 4008), respectively ages 11 and 17, and siblings (N = 801). We observed strong genetic influences on cognitive ability, whereas shared environmental influences were much more important for academic tracking. In multilevel analyses, separate dimensions of socioeconomic resources influenced child cognitive ability, controlling parental cognitive ability. Controlling adolescent cognitive ability and parental cognitive ability, parental socioeconomic resources also directly affected track attendance. This indicated that it is crucial to investigate the intertwined influences on educational outcomes in adolescence of both cognitive ability and the characteristics of the family of origin.

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Notes

  1. In addition to the covariates used in the multivariate analyses, we also used information on the interviewers (age, sex, and tenure with the survey institute), information provided by the interviewer regarding the dwelling, household and family size and composition, region, and community size to generate the imputations.

  2. Covariances and interactions among the components are assumed to be zero. This assumption, however, is often violated, perhaps especially in associations among cognitive ability and education and social attainment measures.

  3. In our sample the correlation between both parents’ CFT was about 0.4 and between both parents’ secondary schooling (binary variable, indicating if a higher secondary track was completed) was about 0.6. Assuming that in general \(\sigma _A^2\) is around 0.6 for cognitive ability and around 0.4 for education (Branigan et al. 2013; Briley and Tucker-Drob 2013) this leads to a genetic correlation of 0.6 in DZ twins for both outcomes.

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Author Contributions

W.S. conceived of the study, coordinated and drafted the manuscript; R.S. conceived of the study, performed the statistical analyses and participated in drafting the manuscript; M.D. participated in the design and was involved in the theoretical framework; W.J. contributed ideas to study design, interpretation of the data, analysis and drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Bielefeld University, P.O. Box 10 01 31, D-33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Wiebke Schulz & Martin Diewald

  2. GESIS Training, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667, Köln, Germany

    Reinhard Schunck

  3. Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, Scotland, UK

    Wendy Johnson

Authors
  1. Wiebke Schulz
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  2. Reinhard Schunck
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  3. Martin Diewald
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  4. Wendy Johnson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wiebke Schulz.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical Approval

All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the German Science Foundation and approved by Bielefeld University.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all students that participated in the study and their parents.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 5

Table 5 Factor loadings of the four subtests of the CFT
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Table 6

Table 6 Pairwise correlations between covariates
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Table 7

Table 7 Standardized variances estimates for CFT score and academic track, alternative codings
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Table 8

Table 8 Random effects models (linear) for family-resources and parent cognitive ability effects on child cognitive ability, unstandardized coefficients
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Table 9

Table 9 Random effects models (logit) for family-resources and parent cognitive ability effects on academic track, odds ratios
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Schulz, W., Schunck, R., Diewald, M. et al. Pathways of Intergenerational Transmission of Advantages during Adolescence: Social Background, Cognitive Ability, and Educational Attainment. J Youth Adolescence 46, 2194–2214 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-017-0718-0

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