No abstract

Neighbourhood effects research has benefited from the application of sequence analysis which, together with cluster analysis, identifies the main temporal patterns of exposure to residential contexts experienced by different groups of people, such as children. However, given that this is a relatively new approach to measuring exposure to neighbourhood deprivation, studies that have utilised sequence analysis to model residential trajectories and test for neighbourhood effects do not contextualise these population-level findings at the individual-level. The current study sought to investigate the patterns of exposure to neighbourhood deprivation experienced by children in Aotearoa New Zealand over the first eight years of life by utilising two different methodological approaches: at the macro-level, the results of the sequence and cluster analysis suggest that in general, children experienced little neighbourhood mobility; at the micro-level, children experienced greater levels of movement between different levels of neighbourhood deprivation in middle childhood, compared to early childhood, while children in the least and most deprived neighbourhoods experienced less mobility than their peers. Together, these findings provide a comprehensive description of the ways in which children are exposed to different residential contexts over time and advance our understandings of how to document these experiences effectively within quantitative research.

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Academic resilience captures academic success despite adversity and thus is an important concept for promoting equity within education. However, our understanding of how and why rates of academic resilience differ between contexts is currently limited by variation in the ways that the construct has been operationalised in quantitative research. Similarly, comparing the strength of protective factors that promote academic resilience is hindered by differing approaches to the measurement of academic resilience. This methodological variation has complicated attempts to reconcile disparate findings about academic resilience. The current study applied six commonly used operationalisations of academic resilience that combined different thresholds of high risk and high achievement, to three international large-scale assessments, to explore how these different operationalisations impacted the findings produced. The context of Aotearoa New Zealand was chosen as a case study to further academic resilience research within this context and investigate how academic resilience manifests in an education system with relatively high levels of average achievement alongside low levels of educational equity. Within international large-scale assessment datasets, prevalence rates differed markedly across subject areas, grade levels, and collection cycles, as a function of the measure of academic resilience employed, while the strength of protective factors was more consistent. Thresholds that were norm-referenced produced more consistent findings across the different datasets compared to thresholds that were criterion-referenced. High levels of missing data prevented the analysis of some datasets, and differences in the way that key constructs were measured undermined the comparability of findings across international large-scale assessments. The findings emphasise the strengths and limitations of utilising international large-scale assessment data for the study of academic resilience, particularly within the Aotearoa New Zealand context. Furthermore, the study highlights that researchers’ methodological decisions have important impacts on the conclusions drawn about academic resilience.