Family and School Capital: Towards a Context Theory of Students’ School Outcomes

Dropping out of high school in Cyprus: do parents and the family matter?

“…As regards parental academic expectations for their children, most parents participating in this study indicated that they would like their children to achieve higher educational and professional level than those of their own. Nevertheless, consistent with previous research (Behnke, Piercy, & Diversi, 2004;Chen, & Kaplan, 2003;Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998;Marjoribanks, 2002), parental educational expectations were associated with their children's academic achievement. Parents of pupils at risk of dropping out seem to expect their children to take up vocational studies more often than their counterparts do, which will allow them to enter the labour market earlier.…”

“…According to this theory, social capital serves to the creation of human capital through education; however, the power and ideology embedded in education and its practices leads to cultural and social inequalities that are reproduced by social classes. Empirical evidence of this theory has been shown by research; among other authors, Marjoribanks (2002Marjoribanks ( , 2003Marjoribanks ( , 2004) explored the relationships among families, schools, individual characteristics and young adults' school outcomes. The study presented in this paper shows that most parents of children at risk of dropping out have low educational background compared with those whose children are not at risk.…”

“…The study presented in this paper shows that most parents of children at risk of dropping out have low educational background compared with those whose children are not at risk. This might influence the extent to which these families can provide their children with the so-called 'home capital' (Coleman, 1988(Coleman, , 1997Marjoribanks, 2002;Symeou, 2007); that is, a home with social and cultural conditions able to support children's cultural, intellectual and social development as this is anticipated by the school system. The low educational standards of most of the parents of children at risk of dropping out participating in this study might well have conditioned their abilities and strategies to help their children at home with school matters.…”

How Do Aspirations Matter?

“…music lessons). However it is important to note that access to, and activation of family capital varies among different individuals and is not guaranteed (Laureau and Horvat 1999;Marjoribanks 2002). In addition, Sen foregrounds the way that, "behaviour depends not only on our values and predispositions, but also on the hard facts of the presence or absence of relevant institutions, and on the incentivesprudential or moral-they generate" (Sen 2004, 43).…”

“…Outside of the capability literature, measures of aspiration have mainly been linked to educational and career-related achievements (Sewell and Shah 1968;Marjoribanks 1998Marjoribanks , 2002Carter 2001;Appadurai 2004;Hart 2004Fuller 2009;Rose and Baird 2013;Hoskins and Barker 2014). According to Carter, "educational aspirations have mostly been studied as a predictor of a variety of outcomes, most notably in relation to education attainment and/or attrition" (2001,11).…”