What Is Going on Around You: Peer Milieus and Educational Aspirations

Raabe, Isabel J.; Wölfer, Ralf

doi:10.1093/esr/jcy048

Cited by 33 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The social interaction with significant others has been shown to be influential in the formation of occupational aspirations. The level of occupational aspirations differs by school context (Wicht and Ludwig-Mayerhofer 2014;Rowan-Kenyon, Perna, and Swan 2011) and by friendships within school classes (Raabe and Ralf 2019). There is further evidence that aspirations of friends become more similar in the process of aspiration formation (Thiele et al 2018;Dickerson, Maragkou, and Steve 2018).…”

Section: Differences By School Achievementsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Adaptation to the market? Status differences between target occupations in the application process and realized training occupation of German adolescents

Schels

Abraham

2021

Journal of Vocational Education & Training

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Adolescents' occupational expectations are relevant for occupational status attainment. In strong vocational education and training (VET) systems, such as in Germany, school leavers face the challenge of forming occupational expectations that correspond to the competitive VET market. This study investigates students' target occupations in the application process and its relation to their first training occupation. Do applicants for VET positions apply for occupations of different socioeconomic status over time? Does the status of the target occupations increasingly fit to the finally achieved training occupation? Are there differences by familial socioeconomic background? Analysis are based on longitudinal data on the application process collected from German students in lower secondary and intermediate secondary schools in one urban area. Overall, the status level of the target occupations at the beginning of the application process differs significantly according to school track, but additionally to school grades or family background. At the end of the application process, the application behaviour becomes diversified: applicants with poor school grades and of low status continue to apply for target occupations at a similar status level but at the same time apply for occupations of relative lower status. This lower level does not, however, translate into training occupations.

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Section: Differences By School Achievementsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Adaptation to the market? Status differences between target occupations in the application process and realized training occupation of German adolescents

Schels

Abraham

2021

Journal of Vocational Education & Training

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“…According to the BG model, they are a 'single decision-making unit' (Breen and Goldthorpe, 1997: 302), but this is an additional, untested assumption, which may be more plausible for lower educational transitions, where parents may have a stronger influence on their children's choices, than for higher educational transitions, where children enjoy greater autonomy. While for parents their own class position seems a 'default' reference point, this does not need to be the case for their children, who may take different reference points, such as their peers' aspirations (Raabe and Wölfer, 2019), or who may be more sensitive to future occupational opportunities than to the past occupational achievements of their parents. As discussed below, our data allow us to test whether the Loss-Aversion Assumption applies to both parents and children alike.…”

Section: The Assumptions Of the Breen-yaish (By) Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative risk aversion models: How plausible are their assumptions?

Barone

Barg

Ichou

2021

Rationality and Society

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This work examines the validity of the two main assumptions of relative risk-aversion models of educational inequality. We compare the Breen-Goldthorpe (BG) and the Breen-Yaish (BY) models in terms of their assumptions about status maintenance motives and beliefs about the occupational risks associated with educational decisions. Concerning the first assumption, our contribution is threefold. First, we criticise the assumption of the BG model that families aim only at avoiding downward mobility and are insensitive to the prospects of upward mobility. We argue that the loss-aversion assumption proposed by BY is a more realistic formulation of status-maintenance motives. Second, we propose and implement a novel empirical approach to assess the validity of the loss-aversion assumption. Third, we present empirical results based on a sample of families of lower secondary school leavers indicating that families are sensitive to the prospects of both upward and downward mobility, and that the loss-aversion hypothesis of BY is empirically supported. As regards the risky choice assumption, we argue that families may not believe that more ambitious educational options entail occupational risks relative to less ambitious ones. We present empirical evidence indicating that, in France, the academic path is not perceived as a risky option. We conclude that, if the restrictive assumptions of the BG model are removed, relative-risk aversion needs not drive educational inequalities.

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“…This is necessary to distinguish a peer influence effect, that is, changing behavior because of an existing friendship, from a peer selection effect, that is, befriending someone who is similar. Regression-based analyses considering the effect of friends (e.g., Carbonaro and Workman 2016; Raabe and Wölfer forthcoming) can associate friends’ characteristics with those of the individual over time, but they cannot account for these different friendship processes. SAOMs that apply longitudinal social network analysis, however, are able to do so (Steglich, Snijders, and Pearson 2010) and have been applied, for instance, to detect friendship selection and social influence on academic achievement (Flashman 2012; Kretschmer, Leszczensky, and Pink 2018).…”

Section: Meeting the Challenge Of Studying Peer Effects Through Dynammentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Pipeline: How Friend Influence and Peer Exposure Widen the STEM Gender Gap

2019

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Individuals' favorite subjects in school can predetermine their educational and occupational careers. If girls develop weaker preferences for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), it can contribute to macrolevel gender inequalities in income and status. Relying on large-scale panel data on adolescents from Sweden (218 classrooms, 4,998 students), we observe a widening gender gap in preferring STEM subjects within a year (girls, 19 to 15 percent; boys, 21 to 20 percent). By applying newly developed randomcoefficient multilevel stochastic actor-oriented models on social network data (27,428 friendships), we investigate how social context contributes to those changes. We find strong evidence that students adjust their preferences to those of their friends (friend influence). Moreover, girls tend to retain their STEM preferences when other girls in their classroom also like STEM (peer exposure). We conclude that these mechanisms amplify preexisting preferences and thereby contribute to the observed dramatic widening of the STEM gender gap.

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What Is Going on Around You: Peer Milieus and Educational Aspirations

Cited by 33 publications

References 39 publications

Adaptation to the market? Status differences between target occupations in the application process and realized training occupation of German adolescents

Adaptation to the market? Status differences between target occupations in the application process and realized training occupation of German adolescents

Relative risk aversion models: How plausible are their assumptions?

The Social Pipeline: How Friend Influence and Peer Exposure Widen the STEM Gender Gap

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