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Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement (2002)

Chapter: 6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges

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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

6
Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges

Claudia Buchmann*

In all societies, the family plays a crucial role in shaping the educational experiences and achievement of children and the transmission of status from one generation to the next. Throughout the world, children of high-status parents are more likely to get ahead in school. Three interrelated processes—the transmission of financial capital, the transmission of cultural resources, and the transmission of social capital from parents to children—are most often called on to explain this phenomenon. But only fairly recently have studies begun to incorporate all three processes into empirical investigations of family background in determining children’s educational status. In this chapter, I review the measurement of family background, tracing its increasingly complex conceptualization and examining the methods used to assess the impact of family background on educational outcomes in international and comparative research. Then I assess the quality and content of family background items of past large-scale international surveys in detail. Specifically, I focus on several surveys conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA): the Six Subject Study, the First and Second International Mathematics Studies, the Second International Science Study, and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. I also discuss the Program for International Student Assessment, a current in

*  

Claudia Buchmann is an assistant professor of sociology at Duke University.

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

ternational survey of student skill and knowledge being organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Examining how large-scale international surveys have dealt with the challenge of measuring family background in a wide range of societies is a valuable exercise; they constitute an impressive foundation of knowledge on what works and what does not. Based on an assessment of these surveys, I offer recommendations for future international studies of educational achievement to consider in the conceptualization and measurement of family background. These include ways to replicate the successes and avoid the pitfalls of prior conceptualizations of family background, as well as ways to expand the measurement of family background to better account for the multidimensional influences and processes of families that have been found to be related directly to children’s academic success.

WHY MEASURE FAMILY BACKGROUND?

Why is it important to measure family background well in international comparative studies of education? There are many good answers to this question, but the most pressing for policy makers relate to the following factors:

  1. The importance of controlling for family influences in investigations of the impact of schools on children’s learning and achievement, so that we can examine school effects net of family background effects. As Coleman (1975, p. 359) stated more than twenty years ago: “In the attempt to discover effects of school factors on achievement, perhaps the principal villain is the fact that student populations in different schools differ at the outset, and because of this difference, it is not possible merely to judge the quality of a school by the achievements of the students leaving it. It is necessary to control in some way for the variations in student input with which the teachers and staff of the school are confronted.” It is crucial to know how students in a population are distributed on a wide range of family factors that are themselves important predictors of achievement; only then can we assess the role of the school in achieving its social and economic objectives, most notably its efficacy in providing greater equality of educational opportunity.

  2. The necessity to improve our knowledge of the ways that the family, as an institution, affects children’s ability and motivation to learn as well as academic achievement. A better understanding of how family background and home environment relate to student learning can help societies formulate policies that may serve to intervene in detrimental family processes or enhance beneficial ones. We are constantly looking

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

for ways to alter educational institutions to improve children’s lives. The same thinking should be applied to the family institution, especially in this era of rapidly changing family life.

  1. The importance of controlling for family influences in comparative research on educational achievement. If, in addition to mean levels of achievement, we want to compare the distribution of educational achievement across societies, we need to measure the social conditions across which achievement (or any other educational outcome) is distributed. Family background is one of the most important social conditions to consider when trying to compare populations cross-nationally. This point can be demonstrated with a simple hypothetical two-country comparison. If Country A greatly outperforms Country B on some measure of achievement, it may be tempting to attribute this difference to the quality of education in the two countries. But if upon further investigation we discover that background characteristics of the two comparison populations are very different—Country A has an ethnically and culturally homogeneous population and relatively low income inequality; Country B is culturally and ethnically diverse, is marked by great income inequality, and has experienced a rapid influx of first-generation immigrants from poor countries—then it becomes clear that the differences in achievement scores may say more about the differences of the student populations than about the quality of education in the two countries. The broad distribution of background influences may well be related to a wider distribution of achievement scores in that context. Moreover, the goals and challenges facing the educational system in Country B are likely quite different from those in Country A. Some would use such examples to argue that comparing societies with their attendant cultural, social, and educational differences is a futile exercise. I believe such comparisons can cumulate in new knowledge on learning processes and school effectiveness if we strive to measure and account for these variations in social conditions in comparative research on educational achievement.

One or more of these goals have guided much of the international research on the relationship between family influences and educational outcomes. The following section reviews this literature and its contributions to these longstanding issues.

FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: WHAT DO WE KNOW?

Although socioeconomic status has always been at the core of the concept of family background, over time, the concept has expanded to include other aspects of families—such as family structure, parental in-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

volvement with children’s schooling, and cultural and educational resources—in order to reflect the complex, multidimensional ways in which family background and home environment influence individual educational outcomes. Here I focus on how the concept of family background has grown from the initial specification of socioeconomic standing of the family of origin, to include family structure and other demographic characteristics, as well as family social and cultural capital.

Socioeconomic Status

Three components—parent’s education, parent’s occupation, and family income—typically comprise the measure of family socioeconomic status (SES). Status attainment research begun by sociologists in the United States more than three decades ago laid the foundation for this conceptualization of socioeconomic status and a methodology—usually path analysis and multiple regression techniques with large survey data sets—to investigate the intergenerational transmission of status. In the classic study, The American Occupational Structure, Blau and Duncan (1967) present a basic model of the stratification process in which father’s education and occupational status explain son’s educational attainment, and all three variables, in turn, explain son’s occupational attainment. Around the same time, Sewell and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin began publishing papers that addressed questions regarding the relative impacts of family background and schooling on subsequent educational and occupational attainments (Sewell, Haller, & Portes, 1969; Sewell & Hauser, 1975). A notable aspect of the “Wisconsin model” of status attainment was its focus on social-psychological factors, such as aspirations and motivation, in conjunction with family socioeconomic status in determining student achievement. In this regard, the Wisconsin model attempted to specify the mediating mechanisms by which family origins influenced individual educational and occupational outcomes. While Blau and Duncan specified father’s occupation and education as separate influences, the Wisconsin researchers usually combined these measures, along with mother’s education and family income, into a single measure of socioeconomic status (Haller & Portes, 1973, p. 63). Despite these measurement differences, both models concluded that socioeconomic status strongly determined educational attainment.

These classic works established a framework for the study of family background on educational attainment in a wide range of contexts. By the early 1980s, more than 500 papers had attempted to replicate or extend their basic findings (Campbell, 1983). Some researchers applied these constructs to nationally representative samples in the United States (Jencks, 1972); others examined their generalizability to very different countries

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

and contexts (Gerber & Hout, 1995; Hansen & Haller, 1973; Smith & Cheung, 1986). Human capital models in economics, in which family background and schooling decisions determined education and earnings outcomes (Becker & Tomes, 1979), also contributed to this growing field.

A thorough review of the burgeoning research on the relationship between family SES and educational outcomes could easily fill a book; instead Table 6-1 provides a reasonably representative sample of the international research on the relationship between socioeconomic status and educational attainment and achievement published since 1970. For each study, the table includes the country of focus, the definition and measurement of SES, the educational outcome studied, and key findings regarding the impact of SES on attainment or achievement. By focusing solely on family background and its relationship to educational outcomes, this summary necessarily neglects other information,1 but permits an assessment of the conceptualization and measurement of socioeconomic status in international studies of educational outcomes.

The table reflects several interesting aspects of the field in general. First, most studies utilized survey data and statistical methods to examine the relationship between family SES and educational outcomes. Some early studies only reported correlations or used analysis of covariance to investigate these relationships, but the bulk of research in this field has relied on multivariate modeling strategies such as regression analysis.

Second, the research on educational attainment and the research on achievement have developed along somewhat distinct lines, with the former often the purview of sociologists, economists, and demographers, and the latter more often studied by educational researchers and policy analysts. Table 6-1 reflects this development by listing studies of attainment (or in some cases, enrollment) in Panel A, and studies of achievement in Panel B. This distinction should not be overstated; certainly sociologists such as Coleman and others made significant contributions to the early study of educational achievement. Nonetheless, it draws attention to some differences in the scope and interests of these two domains of research. For example, although the impact of family background factors is often a central concern in the research on educational attainment, much of the research on educational achievement is concerned with the effects of school factors, curriculum, or pedagogy; family background receives secondary consideration or is treated merely as a control variable. This is partly due to a longstanding preoccupation with finding “school effects” in response to early studies, such as the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966), which seemed to suggest that school-level differences had little impact on variation among individual children in terms of their academic success.

Third, there is more international and comparative research on the

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

determinants of attainment than on the determinants of achievement, largely because achievement data are more difficult to acquire. National population censuses and surveys on diverse topics frequently contain data on the educational histories of all household members that can be used to construct measures of educational attainment. But achievement data must be gathered through the administration of cognitive tests or, in the case of grade-point average or national exam scores, the acquisition of students’ school records, both of which are time-consuming research strategies. The fact that so many of the studies of achievement in Table 6-1 utilize IEA data underscores the importance of these large-scale international surveys as major data sources for research on educational achievement. Here I briefly discuss the major methods and findings of these two interrelated lines of work: research on educational attainment and research on educational achievement.

Research on Educational Attainment

Building on the foundation laid by status attainment research in the United States, much research has examined the role of social origins in determining educational and occupational status and mobility in a range of countries. Some researchers have examined how this relationship changes over time with large societal changes, such as the expansion of formal schooling, the industrialization of society, or the transition from socialism to capitalism. Regardless of their larger agendas, studies in this realm have contributed greatly to our understanding of how family socioeconomic status shapes educational attainment in a wide range of contexts.

Family background has been treated more systematically in research on educational attainment than in research on achievement. The influence of the Blau-Duncan and Wisconsin models is clearly evident; most studies in Panel A conceptualize socioeconomic status as either father’s education and occupation or a composite measure of these and other family background factors. Some researchers have had to alter this approach due to data limitations or considerations of the local context, but still, the systematic approach to the measurement of family background is striking.

Occupational status typically is measured via scales that have been developed to generalize the prestige associated with occupations across a wide range of societies. The earliest of these was the Socioeconomic Index (SEI) scale formulated by Duncan (1961) for the United States and subsequently modified by other researchers for other countries. Many of the studies in Panel A use a modified Duncan SEI scale for father’s occupational status. Also building on Duncan’s scale, comparative stratification

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

TABLE 6-1 International Studies of the Relationship Between Family Socioeconomic Status and Educational Outcomes

Panel A: Attainment

Study

Country

Measures of Family Socioeconomic Status

Hansen & Haller, 1973

Costa Rica

Occupational status, consumption status (index of parental education, house construction, and household possessions)

Kerckhoff, 1974

Great Britain

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Currie, 1977

Uganda

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Cochrane & Jamison, 1982

Thailand

Father’s education, mother’s education, land ownership

Simkus & Andorka, 1982

Hungary

Father’s occupation

Behrman & Wolfe, 1984

Nicaragua

Father’s education, mother’s education, number of siblings, mother present

Mukweso, Papagiannis, & Milton, 1984

Zaire

Father’s education, father’s occupational status, index of consumption goods

Whyte & Parrish, 1984

China

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Robinson & Garnier, 1985

France

Father’s education, father’s class

Smith & Cheung, 1986

Philippines

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Jamison & Lockheed, 1987

Nepal

Father’s education, father’s literacy, father’s modernity, caste, household landholdings

King & Lillard, 1987

Malaysia

Father’s education, mother’s education

Pong & Post, 1991

Hong Kong

Father’s occupational status, mother’s education

Lin & Bian, 1991

China

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Paterson, 1991

Scotland

Father’s occupation, mother’s education., household composition

Shavit & Pierce, 1991

Israel

Mother’s education, father’s education, father’s occupational status

Stevenson & Baker, 1992

Japan

Father’s education, mother’s education, family income

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Outcome

Results

Attainment

Indirect (through aspirations) on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Enrollment

Attainment

Education vars positive on enrollment

Indirect (through aspirations) on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effect on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment; stronger effect of mother’s ed. than father’s ed. on all children

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Enrollment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment; larger effects of mother’s ed. on daughters’ attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

University enrollment

Positive effects on university enrollment

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Study

Country

Measures of Family Socioeconomic Status

Hout, Raftery, & Bell, 1993

United States

Father’s education, father’s occupational status, mother’s education

Blossfeld, 1993

Germany

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

De Graaf & Ganzeboom, status 1993

Netherlands

Father’s education, father’s occupational

Jonsson, 1993

Sweden

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Kerckhoff & Trott, 1993

England Wales

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Cobalti & Schizzerotto, 1993

Italy

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Buchmann, Charles, & Sacchi, 1993

Switzerland

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Tsai & Chiu, 1993

Taiwan

Father’s education, father’s occupational status, mother’s education

Treiman & Yamaguchi, 1993

Japan

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Mateju, 1993

Czechoslovakia

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Szelenyi & Aschaffenburg, 1993

Hungary

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Heyns & Bialecki, 1993

Poland

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Shavit, 1993

Israel

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Lillard & Willis, 1994

Malaysia

Father’s education, father’s earnings, mother’s education

Fuller, Singer, & Keiley, 1995

Botswana

Mother’s education, mother’s employment status, senior male’s employment status, household quality and possessions

Gerber & Hout, 1995

Soviet Russia

Parents’ education, occupational status of main income earner in household

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Outcome

Results

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment; mother’s ed. stronger for daughters

Enrollment (drop out)

Mother’s education significantly related to dropout; no effects of other variables

Attainmenta

Positive effects on attainment

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Study

Country

Measures of Family Socioeconomic Status

Pong, 1996

Malaysia

Household head’s earned income, mother’s education

Tansel, 1997

Cote D’Ivoire

Ghana

Father’s education, mother’s education

Total household expenditure

Zhou, Moen, & Tuma, 1998

China

Father’s education, father’s occupational status

Wong, 1998

Czechoslovakia

Father’s education, household possessions

Buchmann, 2000

Kenya

Parent’s education, household financial status

Panel B: Achievement

Study

IEA Data

Country

Measures of Family Socioeconomic Status

Comber & Keeves, 1973

FISS

19 countries

Home background (index)

Rosier, 1974

FISS

Australia

Home circumstances (index)

Shukla, 1974

FISS

India

Father’s occupation, father’s education, mother’s education, use of dictionary, number of books in the home, family size

Pollock, 1974

FISS

Scotland

Father’s occupation, number of books in the home, family size

Heyneman, 1976

 

Uganda

Parents’ occupation, parents’ education, household possessions

Lanzas & Kingston, 1981

 

Zaire

Education of relative with greatest influence on student’s life (e.g., mother, father, uncle, grandparent)

Cooksey, 1981

 

Cameroon

Mother’s and father’s education, mother’s and father’s occupation, home amenities (running water, electricity, toilet, refrigerator, cooker)

Niles, 1981

 

Sri Lanka

Family SES (index of father’s occupation, father’s education, mother’s education, family income)

Heyneman & Loxley, 1983

SISS

29 countries

Father’s occupation, father’s education, mother’s education, books in home, dictionary or other measure of consumption in home

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Outcome

Results

Enrollment

Positive effects on enrollment

Enrollment,

Attainment

Positive effects of father’s and mother’s education; mother’s education stronger for daughters in Ghana

Entry to 3 levels of schooling

Positive effects on entry at all levels

Attainment

Positive effects on attainment

Enrollment

Positive effects on enrollment

Outcome

Results

Science achievement

Positive effect

Science achievement

Positive effect

Hindi and science achievement in the home

Positive effect of father’s occ. and books

Science achievement

Positive effect of father’s occ.

National exam performance

Positive effect

English achievement

Modest positive effect for students living with parents; no effect for those living with relatives

National exam performance

Positive effect on on performance

Achievement

Positive effect

Science achievement

Positive effect, but smaller than school effects, especially in poorer countries

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Study

IEA Data

Country

Measures of Family Socioeconomic Status

Heyneman, Jamison, & Montenegro, 1984

 

Philippines

Parent’s education

Lockheed, Vail, & Fuller, 1986

SIMS

Thailand

Father’s occupation, mother’s education, home language

Lockheed, Fuller, & Nyirongo, 1989

SIMS

Thailand

Malawi

Mother’s education, father’s occupation

Mother’s education, father’s occupation, electricity in home, radio in home

Riddell, 1989

 

Zimbabwe

Father’s occupation, father’s education, electricity in the home

Jimenez & Lockheed, 1989

SIMS

Thailand

Father’s occupation, mother’s education, home language

Holloway, Fuller, Hess et al., 1990

 

Japan

United States

Father’s occupation, father’s

education, mother’s education

Lee & Lockheed, 1990

SIMS

Nigeria

Father’s occupation (professional versus non-professional)

Katsillis & Rubinson, 1990

 

Greece

Family SES (index of father’s education, father’s occupation, mother’s education, family income), father’s class status

Lockheed & Longford, 1991

SIMS

Thailand

Father’s occupation, mother’s education, home use of four-function calculator, home language

Zuzovsky & Aitkin, 1991

SISS

Israel

Family SES (index of father’s occupation, mother’s education, household composition)

Gamoran, 1991

SIMS

United States

Parent’s education

Baker, Riordan, & Schaub, 1995

SIMS

Belgium

New Zealand

Thailand

Japan

Father’s occupation, mother’s education, home language

aAttainment measured in terms of transitions following Mare (1981).

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Outcome

Results

Science, math

Filipino achievement

Positive effect net of textbooks

Math achievement

Positive effect on math pretest; negligible effect on math posttest, net of pretest

Math achievement

Positive effect

Math and language (math and language)

No effect of ed. or occ.; positive effect of housing measures

English and math achievement

Positive effect

Math achievement

Father’s occupation positive on achievement gains for males in single-sex schools, mother’s ed. for females

Educational achievement

Positive effects

Math achievement

Positive effects, net of school type

Achievement

(GPA)

Positive effects of family SES on achievement; no effect of father’s class status

Math achievement

Positive effects

Science achievement

Positive effect but varies by school

Math achievement

Positive effect

Math achievement

Used as a control to model effect of mixed versus single-sex schools

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

researchers have devoted considerable effort to developing internationally comparative scales of occupational prestige and testing their reliability cross-culturally. Two of these scales, the Standard International Occupational Prestige (SIOP) scale (Treiman, 1977) and the International Socioeconomic Index (ISEI) of occupational status (Ganzeboom, DeGraaf, & Treiman, 1992), have been used extensively in international research. More recently, Ganzeboom and Treiman (1996) have developed a prestige and status scale for the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) of the International Labor Office that will likely be used extensively in future research. Although most prior research has relied on paternal occupational status in constructing this measure, recent empirical evidence indicates that mother’s occupational status has a strong impact on educational achievement (Dronkers, 1989) and attainment (Kalmijn, 1994), independent of father’s education and occupational status. Such findings, combined with the increasing prevalence of women’s full-time labor force participation throughout the world, suggest that mother’s occupational status should be included as a measure of family background in future research.

The inclusion of mother’s education has been more common, perhaps because early status attainment research indicated that mother’s education had positive effects on children’s schooling, net of father’s education and occupational status (Mare, 1981; Sewell & Hauser, 1975). In many cases, maternal and paternal education are highly correlated and researchers use one or the other as a measure of parental education. In contexts where mothers spend more time with their children or where males typically are absent from the household, it is reasonable to expect that mother’s education should have a stronger impact than father’s education, and researchers have used mother’s education as the measure for parental education (see Fuller, Singer, & Keiley, 1995, for the case of Botswana). Another strategy has been to use the sum of both parents’ schooling.

As in the case of occupational status, scales have been developed for measuring educational attainment with the goal of ensuring comparability cross-nationally. CASMIN and ISCED are two such scales. The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) was originally developed by UNESCO and is regularly used by UNESCO and other international organizations for reporting national education statistics. The CASMIN categories were developed as part of a project known as “Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations.” Mueller and colleagues at the University of Mannheim, Germany developed CASMIN with the express purpose of facilitating comparative research on social stratification and mobility. Table 6-2 presents the details of both of these classification schemes.

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

TABLE 6-2 ISCED and CASMIN Educational Classification Schemes

ISCED (International Standard Classification of Education-1997)

0.

Preprimary level of education

1.

Primary level of education (first stage of basic education)

2.

Lower secondary level of education (second stage of basic education)

3.

Upper secondary level of education

4.

Postsecondary, nontertiary education

5.

First stage of tertiary education (not leading directly to an advanced research qualification)

6.

Second stage of tertiary education (leading to an advanced research qualification)

CASMIN (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations)

1a.

Less than compulsory level; no formal certificate

1b.

Minimum, compulsory general elementary certificate

1c.

Minimum, compulsory general education plus basic vocational qualification

2a.

Advanced vocational qualification or intermediate general education plus vocational qualification

2b.

Intermediate academic or general qualification

2c.

Full maturity secondary certificate (Abitur, A-level)

3a.

Lower tertiary certificate (usually vocational)

3b.

Higher tertiary certificate (university degree or above)

 

SOURCES: UNESCO (1997); Mueller & Karle (1993).

ISCED and CASMIN are similar in that they focus on the levels of education completed—elementary, secondary, and tertiary education— and specify some subdivisions at each level. The CASMIN scale goes a step further to distinguish general or academic credentials from vocational credentials. Though they are not without problems (see Kerckhoff, Ezell, & Brown, 2002), these scales have facilitated international comparisons of educational systems and educational stratification.

Developing reliable measures of family wealth or income in studies of educational attainment has been more complicated than developing measures of parental education or occupational status because it is very difficult to get high response rates on income questions, and the accuracy of responses is often suspect. Capturing good comparative measures of wealth in international research is even more problematic, because income and wealth categories seldom are comparable across societies with different income distributions and levels of economic development. These and other challenges with collecting income data have led many researchers to use other measures as proxies for family wealth, such as indices of home possessions and/or home structural characteristics. Some research-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

ers argue that such indices are even better approximations of long-term wealth, because they reflect earnings over a lifetime or the purchasing power of families, while income measures only reflect a particular time point (Filmer & Pritchett, 1999; Liebowitz, 1974; Wong, 1998).

Although generalizations about the large body of research on family background and educational outcomes gloss over the rich details from specific studies, they are nonetheless useful for tracing the progress of this research. First, as the last column of Table 6-1 shows, virtually all studies find that socioeconomic status has a substantial impact on educational attainment across a wide range of contexts. Second, father’s education usually is found to be a stronger determinant than occupational status or mother’s education, although the latter measures are also usually important. Finally, family socioeconomic status tends to have a larger impact on educational attainment and achievement in the earlier stages of the student’s life course than in later ones. But even in later stages— especially in societies where higher education involves substantial cost— family effects are still evident (Steelman & Powell, 1989).

Research on Educational Achievement

In the past three decades, a great deal of research has focused on the role of family background and school effects on educational achievement. The stimuli for much of this research were two major projects, the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966) in the United States and the Plowden Report in Great Britain (Peaker, 1971), which generally concluded that family background was more important than school factors in determining children’s educational achievement. These studies sparked a great deal of interest in assessing the determinants of educational attainment and achievement and set off a lively debate regarding the roles of family and school factors in this process.

This debate was limited largely to industrialized countries, primarily the United States and Great Britain, until Heyneman (1976) published the results of his “Coleman Report for a developing country”. In his study of seventh-grade students from 67 primary schools in Uganda, Heyneman replicated the design of the Coleman Report and found significant effects of school facilities and weak effects of family background on academic achievement. He believed these results to be due to the greater variance in physical facilities of schools and the smaller variance of social class in Uganda.

In subsequent research with IEA data, Heyneman and Loxley (1983) generalized these findings to other developing countries and found that the portion of the variance in achievement attributable to family background was generally much smaller, and that attributable to school qual-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

ity generally much larger, in developing versus industrialized countries. They concluded that “the poorer the country, the greater the impact of school and teacher quality on achievement” (p. 1180). By the mid-1990s, more than 100 studies of school effects had been conducted in a wide range of developing countries, the majority of which found significant effects of school factors, net of family background, on achievement (see Fuller, 1987, and Fuller & Clarke, 1994, for reviews). Most of these studies utilized the production function approach2 and regression analysis to identify the specific determinants of achievement and make inferences about the relative importance of the various inputs to student performance.

From these studies, some general cross-national patterns regarding school effects on student achievement have emerged. Although U.S.-based research suggests that student-teacher ratios and teacher salaries are most important school inputs for student achievement (Card and Krueger, 1992; Hedges, Laine, & Greenwald, 1994), studies in developing countries have found that more basic material inputs such as textbooks, libraries, and teacher training strongly determine achievement (Behrman & Birdsall, 1983; Heyneman & Jamison, 1980; Heyneman & Loxley, 1983; Lockheed, Vail, & Fuller, 1986). Expensive inputs, such as science laboratories, increased teachers’ salaries, and reduced class size, appear to have little effect (Cohn & Rossmiller, 1987). The general conclusion is that basic material inputs are most important in contexts that have inadequate or highly variable educational resources (developing countries), but are less important in contexts where a minimum level of basic resources has been achieved (industrialized countries).

The school effects literature, however, has been critiqued extensively on various fronts and some have questioned the validity of claims regarding cross-national variations in the patterns of school effects. Some critics have questioned the adequacy of the measurement of family background in studies of achievement, which generally has been less systematic than that in research on educational attainment. Specifically, numerous school effects studies have used inadequate or inappropriate controls for family background. Fuller and Clarke comment astutely on this problem:

The aggregate influence of schooling in developing countries has probably been overstated due to the underspecification of student background factors.... The greatest weakness here is the lack of social class measures that are culturally relevant to the particular society or community being studied. If imprecise SES indicators from the West are simply imported and error terms contain unmeasured elements of family background that are highly correlated with school quality, achievement effects will be mistakenly attributed to school factors. Evidence from Indonesia, Malawi, Thailand, and Zimbabwe shows that, when multi-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

ple, situationally relevant indicators of class and ethnicity are utilized, the remaining proportion of achievement variance that can possibly be related to school factors diminishes (Lockheed, Fuller, & Nyirongo, 1989; Ross & Postlethwaite, 1989, 1992). In Indonesia, Ross and Postlethwaite included 11 modern possessions and 10 types of livestock to validly discriminate families’ levels of wealth and social class; together, over half of the total variance explained was attributable to these factors, for achievement in Bahasa, math, and science. (Fuller & Clarke, 1994, p. 136)

Of course, as with all international comparative research, the challenge is to walk the fine line between sensitivity to local context and the concern for comparability across multiple contexts. Although researchers should gauge the appropriateness of “Western-based” measures in non-Western contexts and alter them accordingly, they must also remember that the use of widely divergent measures or concepts leads to results that are less comparable than when similar measures and models are used.

Others have criticized school effects studies on methodological grounds, specifically their reliance on OLS regression analysis and the use of the R-squared measure to determine the impact of family and school effects on student achievement. As Riddell (1989, p. 487) notes, “[C]riticism of such arbitrary use of the proportion of variance as a measure of importance is at least as old as the criticism of the Plowden report. Yet such criticism does not seem to have prevented its continued misuse.” Another methodological caveat of the school effects research involves the “misapplication of a single-level model to a reality that is clearly hierarchical” (Riddell, 1989, p. 484). This problem was likely exacerbated by the use of aggregate data, which inflate estimated effects of family background relative to classroom and school effects (Bidwell & Kasarda, 1980).

In the late 1980s, a new generation of “effective school” research in the United States revisited longstanding questions regarding school and family effects on achievement with multilevel modeling techniques (Aitkin & Longford, 1986; Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986). These analytical strategies allow researchers to take account of the hierarchical nature of most educational data, thereby addressing some of the methodological shortcomings of prior work. Only a few studies have utilized multilevel models to examine school effects in international research, and their results are quite interesting. In contrast to previous research utilizing the production function approach, these studies find greater effects of family background than school factors on educational achievement in Zimbabwe (Riddell, 1989) and Thailand (Lockheed & Longford, 1991). For example, in their analysis of Thai data, Lockheed and Longford find that school-level differences contributed 32 percent of the explained variance in student mathematics achievement, while family and individual factors contributed 68 percent of the explained variance. These studies raise ques-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

tions about past generalizations regarding the differential effects of family background and school factors in developing versus developed countries. Moreover, they have reinvigorated discussions over the proper way to measure and study school effects (for a recent exchange, see Hanushek, 1995; Kremer, 1995). Clearly, the long debate regarding school effects is far from resolved, and more research is needed before definitive conclusions can be established.

Beyond Socioeconomic Status: Other Measures of Family Background

As important as it is, family socioeconomic status captures only one aspect of family background in determining individuals’ educational outcomes. Over time the definition of family background has grown increasingly complex, as substantial research has found that family structure, parental involvement, educational resources in the home, and family social and cultural capital often have independent influences, net of socioeconomic status, on children’s educational outcomes.

Family Structure

Substantial research demonstrates that features of family structure, such as the number of children or the presence of one versus two parents in the household, have ramifications for educational outcomes. Studies of industrialized countries consistently document an inverse relationship between family size and educational performance that persists net of parental education and family income (Blake, 1989; Downey, 1995; Steelman & Powell, 1989). A prominent explanation for this relationship is the “resource dilution hypothesis,” which stresses that material resources and parental attention are diluted with additional children in the household. Negative associations between sibship size and educational outcomes have been replicated in some developing countries, including Thailand (Knodel, Havanon, & Sittitrai, 1990), Malaysia (Parish & Willis, 1993; Pong, 1997), the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines (Montgomery & Lloyd, 1997). Similarly, there are well-documented negative effects of single parenthood on children’s educational outcomes in the United States and other industrialized countries. These range from a greater probability of school dropout to lower achievement, and have been attributed in part to economic stress associated with female headship and in part to the lack of human or social capital in the household (McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994; see Seltzer, 1994, for a review).

Importantly, recent research in developing countries suggests that cross-cultural differences may mitigate the disadvantages of large family size or single parenthood on children’s schooling. In some societies, ex

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

tended family systems and a more collectivist cultural orientation may offset the otherwise detrimental impacts of these family features. For example, Lloyd and Blanc (1996) found that extended family networks in sub-Saharan Africa enable children with academic promise to move to households of “patron” family members, who help them gain access to higher quality schools. In Malaysia, Pong (1996) found that children of divorced mothers, but not of widowed mothers, have lower school participation rates than children of two-parent families. These results are likely due to the buffering role of large kinship systems in Malaysia, whereby widows receive more material support from family members than do divorced mothers (p. 248).

These studies remind researchers to be cognizant of important sociocultural variations as they design questions on family background, and specifically family structure, in cross-national surveys. If such questions are designed carefully, they could be immensely useful to researchers trying to map cross-cultural variations in the relationship between family structure and educational outcomes. Although single-country studies such as those already mentioned point to possible sociocultural patterns in this relationship, the lack of comparable international data on family structure and schooling to date has hindered comparative cross-national research on this topic.

Family Social and Cultural Capital

In addition to human capital (parental education, occupational status) and financial capital (wealth), families may possess social capital, which exists in the relations among persons (Coleman, 1988), and cultural capital, or knowledge of socially valued cultural cues (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; DiMaggio, 1982; Lareau, 1989). Both of these concepts have become very popular among social scientists and policy makers as empirical evidence of the importance of social and cultural capital as predictors of children’s school success expands rapidly.

Coleman, one of the early and most influential proponents of social capital, defined the term as a social structural asset for the individual that facilitates certain beneficial actions and outcomes for those who occupy a given social structure. “Trust, obligations and expectations, norms, relations of authority, and shared information are all examples of social capital because they are resources that arise from the social relationships of individuals who share membership in a common social structure” (Carbonaro, 1998, p. 296). Social capital exists both within the family and between the family and external others (Coleman, 1988, pp. S109-116). Within the family, social capital relates to parent-child ties such as the attention parents devote to their children and their children’s

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

education. Outside the family it pertains to social relationships among parents and parents’ relationships with the institutions (e.g., schools) in the community.

Families also vary in the degree to which they possess cultural capital, or “widely shared, high-status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors) used for social and cultural exclusion” (Lamont & Lareau, 1988, p. 156). The concept is typically operationalized as participation in high-brow cultural activities, such as reading literature, attending concerts, and visiting art museums as well as the presence of cultural objects (books, music) in the home (Teachman, 1987). Several studies have found that cultural capital, measured as student or parental participation in and preferences for such activities, has significant positive effects on educational attainment (De Graaf, 1986; DiMaggio 1982).

Of course, the cultural codes that are considered valuable should vary from society to society (De Graaf, De Graaf, & Kraaykamp, 2000, p. 93). Because societies differ in the institutionalization of high culture, it is important to consider how cultural capital is determined by national differences in educational structures and other societal characteristics. For example, it appears that Bourdieu’s original conception of cultural capital is more appropriate for the case of his home country, France, than for the United States or Great Britain. In fact, some researchers have argued that an emphasis on high-brow cultural activities misses other aspects of cultural capital that should be more relevant to educational success for some groups and in some societies (Buchmann, 2002; De Graaf et al., 2000; Farkas, 1996). Among low-status or poor populations, a conceptualization of cultural capital that focuses on the reading habits and linguistics skills of parents may be more relevant. Parents can transmit linguistic and cognitive skills to children through their own reading behaviors and by helping children become familiar with reading. Research has found parental reading habits to be beneficial to children’s educational performance (Farkas, 1996). In the Netherlands, parental reading habits were more important for children from low social origins than for children from high socioeconomic backgrounds (De Graaf et al., 2000). Finally, research on immigrant populations finds that the ability to speak the language of school instruction is a valuable form of cultural capital that promotes students’ aspirations and achievement (Stanton-Salazar & Dornbush, 1995).

Compared to the research on other aspects of family background, the study of social and cultural capital as it relates to children’s schooling is still in its early stages, and the concepts of social and cultural capital continue to be refined. As in the case of research on family structure, there has been relatively little comparative research on this topic, thus we do not yet understand how these forms of capital and their impact on educational outcomes vary across societies.

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

In sum, our knowledge of the relationship between family background and educational outcomes has expanded greatly in recent decades. Indeed, substantial evidence from virtually every society in the world demonstrates that individuals’ social origins impact their educational experiences. In addition to identifying this fundamental relationship, research has detailed some of the nuances and variations in this relationship across societies. Moreover, significant progress has been made in understanding how family background matters, how family structure intervenes in the relationship between SES and educational outcomes, and the mechanisms by which parents are able to transmit social status to their children via social and cultural capital. Much work remains to be done in terms of further specifying the multidimensional impacts of family environment on children’s schooling, finding ways to improve schools in order to raise the achievements of children from all social backgrounds, and minimizing the impact of such inequalities to the greatest extent possible.

Large-scale international surveys have played a central role in producing the knowledge just discussed and will likely play a greater role in the future. Because they are a major source of standardized and comparative data on the issues of concern to educational researchers and policy makers, they can be especially valuable for comparative cross-national research. But for these surveys to be most useful for addressing central empirical and policy-oriented questions, they must be responsive to the knowledge amassed from the large field of research discussed. The design of these surveys, and their instrumentation regarding family background in particular, will determine the kinds of research questions that can be handled with such survey data, whether specific knowledge gaps can be rectified, and the kinds of answers that might be possible.

FAMILY BACKGROUND MEASURES IN LARGE-SCALE INTERNATIONAL SURVEYS OF EDUCATION

To some degree, large-scale international assessments of educational achievement have followed a similar trajectory to that of the empirical literature discussed, in that the conceptualization and measurement of family background in such surveys has grown more complex and, with some exceptions, extensive over time. But these surveys also have been criticized for their approaches to measuring family background. In an early critique, Inkeles (1979) faults IEA for, among other things, under-analyzing “the relation between school achievement and separate social groups (social class, race, religious or ethnic groups)” (cited in Noah, 1987, p. 144; see also Theisen, Achola, & Boakari, 1983). More recently, Goldstein (1995, p. 12) summarized these studies’ measurement of family

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

background in this way: “With some exceptions, such as the IEA second mathematics study, there is little reliable background extra-institutional information about the characteristics of students’ parents, home amenities, etc. This limits the kinds of causal explanations which can be offered.”

Are such criticisms valid? How well have large-scale international surveys of educational achievement measured the central components of family background? How could these measures be improved in future studies? To address these questions, I review and assess the family background measures from five major surveys conducted by IEA in the past 30 years. I also discuss a major study of the OECD currently in progress, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), that undoubtedly will be a major source of international data for researchers in the near future.3

IEA and PISA Surveys

According to Postlethwaite, executive director of IEA from 1962 to 1972, the main purpose of the IEA survey research has been “to study the relationship between relevant input factors in the social, economic, and pedagogic realms and outputs as measured by performance on international tests . . . the main multivariate analyses of the data [have] attempted to discover the major input and process variables accounting for variation in a given population between students within countries and schools within countries” (Postlethwaite, 1974, p. 158).

The First International Mathematics Study (FIMS) was conducted between 1962 and 1965 in twelve countries, with the goal of examining differences among various educational systems and the relationship between these differences and variations in academic achievement. Major results of the study were published by Husen (1967). The Six Subject Survey, which included what has since become known as the First International Science Study (FISS), began in 1966 with the goal of assessing student achievement in the areas of science, reading comprehension, literature, French as a foreign language, English as a foreign language, and civic education. Major results of the study were published by Comber and Keeves (1973). The Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) was administered in 20 educational systems between 1980 and 1982, and IEA published a report on the results in 1987. The Second International Science Study (SISS) began in 1981 with the goal of providing an overview of science education in 26 educational systems for three target populations: students at the 10-year-old level, at the 14-year-old level, and in the final year of secondary school. SISS results were published in 1987.

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

the most recent and perhaps the most ambitious of the IEA surveys. The study was conducted in 1995 for three populations of students (primary school, middle school, and late secondary school) in 42 countries. Of these, 26 countries (along with 12 additional countries that were not involved in the 1995 survey) participated in TIMSS-R, a followup survey of eighth-grade students in 1999. A third assessment is scheduled for 2003. In addition to the major reports and publications of results by IEA, the survey data have been and will continue to be used extensively by researchers interested in a variety of topics related to education.

Finally, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been organized by OECD as a major assessment of skills and knowledge in the domains of “reading literacy, mathematical literacy, and scientific literacy” as well as the general problem-solving skills of 15-year olds in 32 countries (OECD, 2000). A summary of results from the 2000 survey focusing primarily on reading literacy was published (OECD, 2001); second and third assessments are to be administered in 2003 and 2005, focusing on mathematics and scientific literacy, respectively.4

To investigate the conceptualization and measurement of family background in each of these international studies, I consulted the student background section of each questionnaire, as well as additional documentation for each survey. Table 6-3 provides an overview of the five IEA studies and PISA and their coverage of family background in three broad domains: family socioeconomic status, family structure, and family social and cultural capital. The social and cultural capital domain is further subdivided into educational resources, parental involvement, cultural capital, and minority and residential status.

From the table it is clear that the number of questions has expanded and the conceptualization of features of family life has grown increasingly complex over time. FIMS contained only the most basic questions regarding family socioeconomic status. FISS, SIMS, and SISS included questions in four of the six domains of family background covered in Table 6-3. TIMSS covered five domains and PISA will cover all six domains to some degree.

Measuring Socioeconomic Status

Although all studies include items for parents’ education and all but TIMSS include measures of occupational status, the actual measurement of these factors has varied from survey to survey. Over time, measurement flaws made in earlier surveys were corrected with an eye toward improving the validity and comparability of measures. For example, in FIMS parental education was measured as years of schooling. But the measurement of years of schooling is not comparable across different

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

educational systems; twelve years of education in the United States is generally equivalent to the completion of secondary school, but in other educational systems secondary school may consist of fewer or more years. Perhaps in response to this problem, FISS and SISS used the level of education completed, but assigned arbitrary years of education to each level, such that response options consisted of grade 10 or less, grade 11, and grade 12 and 0, 1-2, 3-4, or 4+ years of postsecondary education. This scheme created a new problem in that it could not account for variations in educational level for parents with fewer years of school. In countries where the majority of adults did not complete at least ten years of school, substantial differences in educational attainment were entirely masked. It is surprising that the problem was not found in the analysis of FISS data and that SISS replicated this coding scheme.

Measurement of parental education was improved in SIMS and TIMSS; in each case, general levels of schooling were used. It is unclear why ISCED educational categories were not used, because ISCED is the most common internationally standardized classification scheme for educational attainment. Nor can ISCED categories be derived from the classification schemes used in these surveys because they are not as specific as those in ISCED (see Table 6-2). ISCED distinguishes between the completion of lower and upper secondary school, and the completion of a first university degree and additional degrees at the tertiary level (e.g., M.A. and Ph.D.). Although the consequences of this coding decision likely are not severe, it means that researchers cannot easily link the data from these surveys to the other abundant sources of information that use ISCED categories. Fortunately, TIMSS allowed countries to alter the response categories to fit their educational systems. This option seems to provide comparability between countries while capturing country-specific features of educational systems. It also is possible that ISCED categories can be derived from the country-specific educational classifications for some countries. PISA does use ISCED categories for the coding of parents’ educational attainment, thus ensuring that researchers will be able to use PISA data in conjunction with other UNESCO and OECD data.

In terms of occupational status, early studies focused on father’s occupation in a format that asked for job title and activities. In the First International Mathematics Study, these responses were coded according to a common occupational classification scale for all countries (Husen, 1967, Vol. 1, pp. 138-144). The First International Science Study asked each country to use the occupational classification that was generally employed in social science research in that country; in the Second International Science Study, this format was followed again, but classifications were then collapsed into a four-category scale consisting of: (1) professional and managerial workers, (2) clerical workers, (3) skilled workers,

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

TABLE 6-3 Family Background Measures in Large-Scale International Assessments of Educational Achievement

Study

Socioeconomic Status

Family Structure

Educational Resources

First

International

Mathematics

Study (IEA 1967)

Father’s educationa

Mother’s educationa

Father’s occupationf

Mother’s employment statush

 

 

First

International

Science Study

(IEA 1973)

Father’s educationb

Mother’s educationb

Father’s occupationb

Number of siblings

Student’s birth order

Dictionary

Books

Daily newspaper

Second

International

Mathematics

Study (IEA 1985)

Father’s educationc

Mother’s educationc

Father’s occupationg

Mother’s occupationi

 

Abacus

Slide rule

Four-function calculator

Scientific calculator

Programmable calculator

Computer

Second

International

Science Study

(IEA 1987)

Father’s educationb

Mother’s educationb

Father’s occupationg

Mother’s occupationj

Number of siblings

Student’s birth order

Dictionary

Books

Third

International

Mathematics

and Science

Study (IEA 1995)

Father’s educationd

Mother’s educationd

Home possessions

Who lives at home with you?

Total people in home

Dictionary

Books

Calculator

Computer

Desk

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Social and Cultural Capital

Parental Involvement

Cultural Capital

Minority and Residential Status

Help with homework

Check spelling

Encourage reading

Ask about school

 

 

Help with homework

Parental perceptions of math

 

Home language

 

 

Country of birth (student, mother, father)

Home language

Number of years in country

 

How often: read a book,

visit museum,

attend concert,

go to theatre,

go to movies,

watch educational TV.

Born in country? (student, mother, father)

If no, student’s age at migration to country

Home language

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Study

Socioeconomic Status

Family Structure

Educational Resources

Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD 2000)

Father’s educatione

Mother’s educatione

Father’s occupationk

Mother’s occupationk

Home possessions

Number of siblings

Student’s birth order

Who lives at home with you?

Dictionary

Books

Calculator

Textbooks

Desk

Quiet place to study

Internet

Educational software

Computer

Musical instrument

Coding Schemes

Education:

aGrade completed 1-17+.

bGrade completed 10 or less, 11, 12, 0, 1-2, 3-4, 4+ years of postsecondary education.

cLess than primary, finished primary, less than secondary, finished secondary, trade certificate, attended college, finished college.

dFinished primary, some secondary, finished secondary, some vocational/technical, some university, finished university. Countries were allowed to alter this coding scheme.

eISCED categories.

and (4) semiskilled/unskilled workers (Keeves & Saha, 1992). Using SISS data, Keeves and Saha analyzed several alternative occupation scales, including the four-category scale, a two-category (white-collar/blue-collar) scale, and the Treiman SIOP scale. They found that both the four-category scale and the Treiman scale were most appropriate across a range of countries, and that the Treiman scale was better able to discriminate among higher occupational status categories.

The surveys also varied in their consideration of mother’s occupational status. FIMS asked a question on mother’s employment status (no job, part-time, full-time), but did not provide an option for recording her occupational status, if employed. SIMS was the first study to record both mother’s and father’s occupational status, and used wording that allowed the student to answer the question for either mother/father or female/ male guardian.

TIMSS differed markedly from prior studies in that it did not include questions on parental occupation. TIMSS organizers believed the prob-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

Social and Cultural Capital

Parental Involvement

Cultural Capital

Minority and Residential Status

Help with homework

Parental involvement

Time talking;

eating main meal together;

discussing social, political,

and cultural issues

How often in past year:

visit museum,

attend concert,

go to theatre,

go to movies,

go to sporting events.

Born in country? (student, mother, father)

Home language

Occupation:

f Title and job activities of father.

gTitle and job activitities of father/guardian.

hNo job, part-time, full-time employment status of mother.

iNo job, part-time, full-time, if employed, title and job activities of mother/female guardian.

j Title and job activities of mother.

kTitle, job activities, and occupational status (measured through ISEI) of father/ mother.

lems in gathering parental occupational status noted in prior IEA surveys raised questions about the feasibility of gathering reliable and usable data on parental occupation in TIMSS (Larry Suter, personal communication, September 11, 2000). Indeed the challenges of collecting wealth and occupational status are well known. As Keeves and Saha (1992, p. 166) explain:

[A]ny direct measure of the financial resources of the economic characteristics of the home cannot be collected in studies of educational achievement where the data are obtained from students in schools and classrooms. Even to ask questions about father’s occupation is problematic in some countries. IEA has always encountered sensitivities in obtaining data for this indicator of social status, which have intensified with the increasing awareness of issues associated with confidentiality of information that is gathered from surveys and stored within computer systems. The usefulness of such information in establishing relationships between home background and achievement outcomes has been widely recognized and appropriate questions have generally been in-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

cluded in questionnaires. Nevertheless, in some countries, the amount of missing data as a consequence of non-response has commonly been substantial.

Such concerns, along with knowledge that several participating countries would not allow questions on parental occupation and wealth, likely led to the decision to exclude questions regarding parental occupational status from TIMSS. Thus the measurement of socioeconomic status was limited to two components: parental education and home possessions. To measure home possessions, countries were invited to add up to twelve items on home possessions beyond the educational resources listed in Table 6-3 that were standard for all countries. The final list of home possessions varied substantially across countries.

In the ongoing search to solve the problem of developing standard, internationally comparable measures of wealth in the absence of income data, household possessions have been the focus of much recent attention, especially in the fields of development economics and health. The measurement of household possessions usually is applied to examining wealth differences as they relate to health outcomes, such as immunization coverage, child mortality (Hammer, 1999), or nutrition (Rutstein, 1999), but is readily applicable to the study of educational outcomes. As noted, some researchers believe household assets capture wealth better than income, because income can fluctuate greatly over time and assets may reflect a more stable and continuous source of wealth.

Current research should be of considerable value to the designers of future large-scale surveys in this regard. Using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 35 developing countries, economists Filmer and Pritchett (1999) created an “asset index” from survey questions on household possessions (e.g., radio, television, bicycle) and housing characteristics (presence of electricity, the type of construction materials used). There was substantial overlap in the questions asked in different countries, but the precise list of variables derived from the questions varied from 9 in some countries to 21 in others. The variables were aggregated into an index using principal components analysis5 (p. 88). The asset index was calculated separately for each country. Within each country, individuals or households were sorted and assigned to wealth groups (poor, middle, rich) on the bases of their values for the asset index (p. 89). Filmer and Pritchett are careful to point out that the levels of the asset index are not directly comparable across countries (e.g., poor households in Brazil do not have the same standard of living as the poor in Turkey) and the gap between rich and poor likely varies between countries (e.g., the gap between poor and rich households in Brazil could be larger than the gap between poor and rich households in Turkey). But the asset index performs as well as more traditional measures of wealth, and has the addi-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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tional advantage of being comparable across countries. Thus, the real value of such an asset index is that it can be used to evaluate the distribution of educational outcomes across different socioeconomic status groups within countries. By applying such strategies to the study of educational achievement, we can begin to ask questions like, “How do the poorest 30 percent of students in Country A compare to the poorest 30 percent of students in Country B in terms of math achievement, both absolutely and relative to the rich in each country?” This is not a trivial question, because it helps to focus attention on the subpopulations for which high rates of achievement are most often elusive.

The inclusion of household possession questions also may help address problems of missing and inaccurate data on family background. All surveys that collect data on family background from students themselves have problems with nonresponse or inaccuracies. For example, an analysis of data from the U.S. High School and Beyond Survey, which asked questions of students and parents, found low correlations between student and parent responses for some family background factors: .21 for the presence of a specific place to study, .35 for the presence of an encyclopedia, .44 for mother’s occupation, and .87 for father’s education (Koretz, 1992). Such discrepancies between student and parent responses raise serious questions about the accuracy of these data. It also appears that nonresponse regarding parents’ education questions for TIMSS and TIMSS-R is quite high. In the U.S. sample for TIMSS-R, roughly 25 percent of students did not complete the question on father’s education and 19 percent did not complete it for mother’s education; nonresponse for the item on number of books in the home was much lower, around 2 percent (Larry Suter, personal communication, October 18, 2000). A recent study that used TIMSS data to examine the influences of educational achievement in ten European countries reports that missing data on parents’ education was too high in all countries (more than 20 percent) to allow some kind of imputation to replace missing values (Bos & Kuiper, 1999). Instead, the researchers used the “number of books in the home” measure as a proxy variable; as in the United States, this variable apparently had a much lower rate of nonresponse in European countries.

Researchers Boe and May at the University of Pennsylvania are working to develop an index for socioeconomic status using TIMSS data on household possessions. One challenge, however, is the current lack of standardization across countries on a core group of household possessions. Thus, although the addition of household assets measures in TIMSS was clearly an improvement over prior surveys, future surveys should try to ensure some level of comparability across countries on a core set of possession measures. A careful assessment of the reliability and validity of home possessions as a measure of SES within countries and as a con-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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struct that holds cross-nationally may determine that home possessions data can provide better and more comparable measures of socioeconomic status than parental education and occupation.

Measuring Family Structure

FISS was ahead of its time in measuring both birth order and number of siblings, and SISS used the same format. Some studies did not include any measures of family structure, and worse yet, TIMSS included questions on household configuration in such a way that the elements of family structure likely most important for educational outcomes cannot be definitively determined. Students were asked to indicate (yes/no) whether the following people lived at home with them most or all of the time: mother, father, one or more brothers, one or more sisters, stepmother, stepfather, one or more grandparents, other relatives, other non-relatives. Finally, they were asked to supply the total number of people living in their home. The best that researchers can do with these data is to distinguish children living with both biological parents from children living with single parents. But the potential wealth of information on other aspects of family structure is compromised by the question format. There is no way to deduce the total number of siblings, the child’s birth order, or the actual structure of the family (i.e., total number of adults in the household). Also, in its focus on living arrangements rather than family configuration, the survey provides no data on family structure for children who do not live at home (a common situation in some countries). In the measurement of family structure, then, TIMSS did a poorer job than surveys that preceded it. PISA follows a similar format but has the advantage of asking an additional question about the total number of older and younger brothers and sisters so that the sibship size and birth order of each student can be determined. This is a notable improvement over the TIMSS format.

Measuring Social and Cultural Capital

Designers of the early IEA studies appear to have recognized the importance of educational resources in the home as a measure of cultural capital that can facilitate educational success. With the exception of FIMS, all studies include some measures of educational resources that are expected to be related to student achievement. Over time the types of resources included reflect technological changes in educational resources themselves. FISS and SISS asked only about reading materials (dictionary, books, daily newspaper). SIMS included a question on the presence of a computer in the home, even at a time before home computers were com-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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mon in many countries. PISA is most specific in this regard and asks about computer-related resources, such as educational software and access to the Internet, to appropriately reflect the rapid changes in computer usage for educational activities in recent years.

Other measures of cultural capital are relatively recent additions to large-scale international surveys. Only TIMSS and PISA include questions regarding parent’s/children’s participation in cultural activities. Given recent research findings on the importance of other forms of cultural capital, especially parent’s reading habits, future surveys should consider adding one or two questions to address this aspect as well. Finally, the more recent surveys ask questions regarding immigrant status and the language spoken in the home. Thus, they provide researchers with a valuable source of data to examine the role of immigrant status and home language in children’s educational achievement cross-nationally.

Parental involvement, a primary indicator of social capital within the family, is measured less systematically. Early studies included questions about parent’s help with homework and involvement in children’s schooling more generally, but neither SIMS nor TIMSS included questions on this topic. PISA asks several interesting questions on parental involvement, including whether parents and children eat a main meal together and how much time they spend talking to each other, in addition to whether parents assist children with homework.

Assessment

In sum, in order to assess the progress in the measurement of family background in these surveys over the past decades, it may be useful to revisit the main reasons for measuring family background stated at the outset of this paper, because the adequacy of family background measures may vary according to the goals toward which they are applied. In terms of the first goal of controlling for family influences in order to examine school effects net of family effects, substantial progress has been made in the more than thirty years since the first IEA survey was conducted. Many of the flaws, such as those in the measurement of parental education and occupation, were addressed and improved in subsequent surveys. Recent surveys have been more cognizant of the multidimensional influences of family life and, in contrast to prior surveys, have incorporated questions regarding family cultural capital, home language, and immigrant status.

In terms of the second goal of studying family background as a determinant of educational achievement in its own right, the measurement of family background also has improved. Growing awareness of the central importance of family background in determining educational achieve-

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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ment is reflected in reports based on data from international achievement surveys. Early reports, such as those based on FISS data, paid little attention to socioeconomic status or other aspects of family background. Home background influences were aggregated into a single construct and used primarily as a control variable in analyses of the impact of school factors on educational achievement (Comber & Keeves, 1973). Analyses of SISS data treated family background in somewhat greater detail and not just as a control variable. For example, Postlethwaite and Wiley (1992, pp. 125-128) presented a complex path analysis in which family SES was hypothesized to influence students’ views regarding science, their liking of school, and their science achievement (see also Keeves, 1992). Published reports based on TIMSS data provide the most detailed summaries of family background influences on academic achievement. Each of the five reports published thus far (Beaton et al., 1996a, 1996b; Mullis et al., 1997a, 1997b, 1998) devotes a chapter to family factors and provides summary statistics for various measures of family background as they relate to achievement in each country. For example, Beaton et al. (1996a, 1996b) report mean achievement scores for each response category for questions relating to the number of books in the home, highest level of education for either parent, and the presence of study desk, dictionary, and computer in the home. Even this relatively simple presentation of bivariate relationships improves on past reports and underscores the strong correlations between aspects of family background and educational achievement. Thus, although the primary focus of international assessments of educational achievement remains on school factors and processes, the attention devoted to family background factors in both the design of the surveys and the reports of the data is greater today than ever.

Although the general picture is one of progress, in hindsight it is also apparent that some inconsistencies in data collection might have been avoided. Most notably, these are the lack of parents’ occupational status and the weaknesses of the family structure data in the TIMSS survey. The implications of these weaknesses are becoming apparent as researchers begin to utilize the TIMSS data. The American Institutes for Research recently “polled” researchers conducting secondary analyses using TIMSS data on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of TIMSS. In the report of their findings to the TIMSS-R Technical Review Panel, they summarized researcher’s opinions in the following way: “[T]he over-whelming consensus was that TIMSS was the richest, most comprehensive set of truly comparable cross-national data ever collected.” On the downside, among other things, researchers “wished there was more background information on family socioeconomic status” (American Institutes for Research, Memorandum to Members of the TIMSS-R Technical Review Panel, 2000, p. 4). The limitations of the family background data

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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in TIMSS are further reflected in current research projects attempting to study the impact of family background on educational outcomes or control for family background in assessments of school factors. Most of these studies use only one measure of family background, either parental education (e.g., Schiller, Khmelkov, & Wang, 2000) or number of books in the home (e.g., Boe, Turner, Leow, & Barkanic, 1999; Bos & Kuiper, 1999); they acknowledge that these are incomplete measures of family background, but that TIMSS offers few alternatives. Thus, for the explicit purpose of examining the relationship between family background and educational outcomes across nations, further improvements are necessary in the measurement of family background in cross-national surveys of educational achievement.

Finally, it appears that the data from IEA studies have been under-utilized in terms of the third goal of comparing the distribution of educational achievement within and across societies. Much more energy has been devoted to comparing nations in terms of average achievement than to comparing nations in terms of the dispersion of math and science achievement scores or other educational outcomes. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, as mentioned previously, awareness of variations in terms of family background and other factors of student populations provides crucial context for comparing average performance across nations; without such contextual qualifications, differences in achievement scores may reveal very little about the effectiveness of educational systems being compared. Second, investigations of the achievement gaps between students from poor versus rich (single-parent versus two-parent, educated versus uneducated) families could yield valuable information regarding how the distribution of achievement scores relate to other inequalities within societies. Cross-national comparisons of such achievement gaps would go far beyond the usual comparison of average achievement scores across countries. For example, if such analyses revealed that some countries have comparatively small achievement gaps between rich and poor students, these cases could be informative for countries struggling with large performance gaps by socioeconomic status. Focused investigation on the achievement of poorest students and those attending resource-impoverished schools across societies also might be illuminating. Some countries with relatively high average achievement scores might look quite different when examined from this perspective.

Recently, Berliner similarly emphasized the necessity to look at the extremes in addition to the averages in the case of the results of TIMSS-R for the United States:

The U.S. average masks the scores of students from terrific public schools and hides the scores of students attending shamefully inadequate schools.... Average scores mislead completely in a country as heteroge

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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neous as ours. We have many excellent public schools, and many that are not nearly as good. Those who want to undermine our public schools often condemn the whole system rather than face the inequities within it. They should focus their attention instead on rescuing the under-funded and ill-equipped schools that are failing children in our poorest neighborhoods. (The Washington Post, January 28, 2001, p. B3)

Indeed, focused analyses of factors related to low achievement of students from low-SES or otherwise impoverished backgrounds in the United States and other countries could shed considerable light on the reasons for their underperformance and suggest remedies targeted to student populations in great need of assistance.

As first step in this direction, a recent report by the U.S. Department of Education (2000) makes a concerted effort to examine the distribution of student achievement across subpopulations of U.S. students (by economic circumstances, family configuration, parental education, etc.) and to compare the averages of these subpopulations to the average achievement scores of other nations (see Figure 6-1). These comparisons are revealing and generally demonstrate that students from low socioeconomic circumstances (as indicated by the home possessions measure) perform substantially worse than the international average, while average achievement scores for students of middle and upper socioeconomic status is equal to or above the international average. As this example demonstrates, investigations of the distribution of achievement scores within and between societies can provide valuable information. The accurate examination of the distribution of educational outcomes requires that we measure the social conditions, especially family background, across which such outcomes are distributed.

Undoubtedly, large-scale international surveys have contributed much to understanding the effects of family background on educational outcomes, the impact of school effects net of family effects on educational achievement, and the determinants of unequal educational opportunities and outcomes within and across societies. The fact that so many of the studies in Panel B of Table 6-1 utilize IEA data is further testimony to the great value of these surveys. To ensure that future surveys continue to make such contributions and improve on knowledge gleaned from prior research, they should take advantage of the solid foundation that prior surveys contribute to the conceptualization and measurement of family background. Toward that goal, I offer several recommendations for consideration. The first relates to the treatment of prior survey data; the remaining recommendations relate to the development of future surveys.

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

FIGURE 6-1 Family wealth and science achievement: Science total scores; upper grade, Population 2; 1995.

NOTES: Nations not meeting international sampling guidelines shown in italics. Unshaded areas indicate 95 percent confidence interval of population group mean. Population group mean scores are shown in unshaded area in approximate position. The French-speaking (Belgium-Fr) and the Flemish-speaking (Belgium-Fl) populations of Belgium were sampled separately. The placement of Sweden may appear out of place; however, statistically the placement is correct. Latvia (LSS) indicates only Latvian-speaking schools were sampled.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education (2000, p. 77).

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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RECOMMENDATIONS

  1. One of the great benefits of TIMSS has been the ease of use of the data files for secondary analysis, especially the ability for researchers to download them from the TIMSS Web site. If prior surveys, especially SIMS and SISS, could be made similarly accessible via the Internet, it is likely that more researchers would utilize these valuable sources of international data to address questions related to family background and educational outcomes. Moreover, researchers might be encouraged to consider comparing the results of these surveys over time if they had easy access to all three data sources. This is one relatively straightforward way to further the productive synergies between the researchers conducting secondary analyses of the survey data and the survey organizers.

  2. Measures of parental education and occupational status are core components of family background that should be incorporated, when possible, into future surveys. Although the problems of missing data and concerns regarding reliability are likely to continue, the value of data gathered on these core concepts often will outweigh these caveats. In some cases, such as with young student populations who might not provide accurate answers or in countries where collecting such information is forbidden by law, incorporating these measures is not feasible. In other cases, as with older student populations, such data can provide valuable information on family background. Survey designers should weigh the advantages and disadvantages of obtaining information on parents’ education and occupation and collect it where possible.

  3. Future studies should follow the examples set by TIMSS and PISA and include questions on home possessions as a proxy for wealth. Following the methods of Filmer and Pritchett and other researchers, effort should be devoted to devising a common core of possessions that would allow for cross-national comparisons, but also allow for additional components of this construct to capture variations in home possessions that are of particular interest within nations. Recent and ongoing research on the construction of indices using home possession measures should provide a valuable source of information as survey designers consider how to best measure socioeconomic status with measures of home possessions. Until a definitive conclusion is drawn, however, surveys should strive to include multiple measures of socioeconomic status, namely parents’ education, parents’ occupation, and home possessions.

  4. Relatedly, a careful assessment of prior IEA survey data should be conducted to determine the extent of problems related to nonresponse, validity, and reliability of various measures of family SES. Such an assessment could reveal how these problems vary by country or question format and could offer clear recommendations on which types of questions

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
×

are likely to yield the most robust and valid information on family socioeconomic status.

  1. Large-scale international surveys are the best source of comparative data available to study the relationship between family background and educational outcomes across a wide range of societies. Although the investigation of this relationship has not always been the primary concern of survey designers, these surveys do have the (perhaps unenviable) burden to provide researchers with the best family background data possible. Thus in the areas where knowledge is weakest, namely the mapping of cross-cultural variations in the impact of family structure and social/ cultural capital on educational outcomes, these surveys have an especially large contribution to make. Therefore, family structure and social/ cultural capital should be incorporated consistently as aspects of family background. The questions on family structure must be formulated carefully, so that the most important elements of family structure, namely number of brothers and sisters and headship of the household (e.g., single parent versus two biological parents versus stepparent) can be determined. Surveys should include the multiple dimensions of family social and cultural capital, including parental involvement, and parent’s/children’s participation in cultural activities. Surveys organizers should attend to the ongoing research in these areas; as the concepts of social and cultural capital continue to be refined, survey questions may need revision.

  2. More generally, a strategy of standardization on core components of a concept, combined with options for nations to include variations, could be an efficient and fruitful way to measure the multiple dimensions of family background and simultaneously fill the need for comparative, yet context-sensitive measures. Researchers interested primarily in international comparisons could utilize the core standardized components, and researchers interested in examining questions of particular concern within a country could take advantage of the context-sensitive measures.

  3. The conceptualization of “the family” varies from society to society. Problems regarding different definitions of “family” and “household” could be minimized by explicitly supplying respondents the definition they should use when answering survey questions. For example, before asking about parents’ educational and occupational status, the PISA questionnaire clarifies its definition of “parent” for the respondent in the following way:

Some of the following questions are about your mother and father (or those person[s] who are like a mother or father to you—for example, guardians, step-parents, foster parents, etc.). If you share your time with more than one set of parents or guardians, please answer the following

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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questions for those parents/step-parents/guardians you spend the most time with. (OECD, 2000, p. 6).

Such clarifications help assure that respondents use the same definition of family or family members as that intended by the survey.

It is important to remember that family background is only one of the many topics covered in international studies of educational achievement. Considering their scope, both in terms of content and geographic coverage, the accomplishments of these studies are extremely impressive. Large-scale international surveys have been a valuable source of data for researchers and policy makers concerned with understanding the determinants of educational outcomes. As Husen (1987, p. 33) notes,

Cross-national comparisons of student achievements and attitudes provide a unique opportunity for disentangling the relative effect of the factors that the child brings to school. These are the social influences at large and home background in particular, on the one hand, and the key factors operating in the school situation on the other hand.

Careful consideration and measurement of family background factors can help to ensure that future surveys continue to provide detailed and comprehensive data with which to address longstanding questions regarding children’s learning processes and educational achievement throughout the world.

NOTES

1.  

For example, most of the studies listed in the table consider other independent or dependent variables (especially occupational status). Some studies employ cross-sectional data; others use longitudinal data. This information, as well as the broader goals of each research project, cannot be gleaned from Table 6-1; the studies should be consulted directly (see References).

2.  

This approach focuses on the relationship between measurable educational inputs and school outcomes and is derived from the notion that the output of the educational process, namely individual student achievement, is related directly to a series of inputs (Hanushek, 1995, pp. 228-229). Family inputs commonly are measured by parental education, income, wealth, and family size. School inputs typically are conceptualized as teachers’ characteristics, school organization, and community factors.

3.  

I do not discuss other major surveys such as the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP) or International Adult Literacy Survey because their questionnaires did not include major sections on the family background of respondents.

4.  

An additional survey project worthy of note is the Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). In the past decade, this project conducted two assessments (SACMEQ I and II) of conditions of schooling and the quality of primary education in 15 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa. Like the IEA surveys, SACMEQ surveys gathered data on students, teachers, and school administrators, but they also contain family background questions appropriate for developing country contexts. For example, family wealth is assessed with questions on livestock holdings,

Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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household possessions, and structural conditions of the home. Interestingly, the questions on home possessions in TIMSS and PISA were modeled after the SACMEQ survey (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this information). Further information about SACMEQ can be obtained from Kenneth N. Ross, International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), UNESCO, Paris, France.

5.  

As Filmer and Pritchett (1999, p. 88) explain, principal components analysis is a technique closely related to factor analysis that is used for “summarizing the information contained in a large number of variables to a smaller number by creating a set of mutually uncorrelated components of the data.” For a detailed discussion of this procedure, see Filmer and Pritchett (1998).

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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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Suggested Citation:"6. Measuring Family Background in International Studies of Education: Conceptual Issues and Methodological Challenges." National Research Council. 2002. Methodological Advances in Cross-National Surveys of Educational Achievement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10322.
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In November 2000, the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) held a symposium to draw on the wealth of experience gathered over a four--decade period, to evaluate improvement in the quality of the methodologies used in international studies, and to identify the most pressing methodological issues that remain to be solved. Since 1960, the United States has participated in 15 large--scale cross--national education surveys. The most assessed subjects have been science and mathematics through reading comprehension, geography, nonverbal reasoning, literature, French, English as a foreign language, civic education, history, computers in education, primary education, and second--language acquisition. The papers prepared for this symposium and discussions of those papers make up the volume, representing the most up--to--date and comprehensive assessment of methodological strengths and weaknesses of international comparative studies of student achievement. These papers answer the following questions: (1) What is the methodological quality of the most recent international surveys of student achievement? How authoritative are the results? (2) Has the methodological quality of international achievement studies improved over the past 40 years? and (3) What are promising opportunities for future improvement?

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