Pelikh, Alina; Henderson, Morag; (2024) Sibling similarity in education and employment trajectories in the UK: Same same, but different? (Understanding Society Working Paper Series 2024-02). UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Social Research Institute: London, UK.

Preview

Text 2024-02.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Young people’s early education and employment trajectories (EET) hold profound implications for perpetuating or alleviating social inequalities across the life course. Considerable evidence indicates that family background, including dimensions like socioeconomic status and ethnicity, plays an instrumental role in shaping these trajectories. However, we have little understanding of how similar or different these trajectories are between siblings and which early adolescent experiences affect individual trajectories, after accounting for parental background. By using unique data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study which allows to follow siblings from adolescent years into their transition to adulthood, this paper explored which early adolescent experiences (10-15) influence differences in education and employment of siblings in late adolescence (16-19) for individuals born between 1993-2002. Specifically, this study looks at the role of family characteristics, including parental background and family type, as well as individual experiences, such as personal educational aspirations and mental health. We first document the trajectories through sequence analysis and then use multivariable regression models to compare the EETs of unrelated sibling dyads, who were matched on many background characteristics to discern the role of family characteristics, including the influence of parental background and family type, as well as the contribution of compositional factors (i.e., sex composition and age gap), in shaping EET. Thereafter we compare the EET of sibling dyads to discern how individual-level experiences and attitudes, including aspiration, attitudes, perceived family support and mental health relate to differences between sibling trajectories. The study has three key findings. First, siblings exhibited a greater tendency to follow similar post-16 EET compared to unrelated young people from similar backgrounds, but the type of EET was highly determined by parental background characteristics. Siblings from highly educated mothers and two-parent households faced fewer barriers to accessing further education and securing smoother school-to-work transitions. In contrast, siblings from less privileged backgrounds may share exposures to scarcity of financial, social and cultural resources that constrain their options after finishing school and thus increase the chances of following more turbulent EET. Second, first-born children and those from smaller families had substantively higher chance of staying in education which most likely will lead to more favourable occupational and income outcomes in the future suggesting that birth order and family size may play an important role in the process of status attainment within the family. Third, this study highlighted that siblings often diverge onto different trajectories, pointing to the role of individual experiences in the process of status attainment within the family. Positive educational aspirations emerge as significant predictors of favourable EET outcomes, even after controlling for family background and sibling perceptions of family support and mental health play key roles in shaping trajectories.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item