Burger, Kaspar;
Brack, Nathan;
(2025)
Origins, belonging, and expectations: assessing resource compensation and reinforcement in academic educational trajectories.
Social Forces
, 103
(3)
pp. 905-927.
10.1093/sf/soae113.
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Abstract
Research has shown that socioeconomic and psychological resources may influence educational trajectories. There are still unanswered questions, however, about the unique roles of these resources and the interplay between them. We consider two such questions: First, how do major psychological resources - a sense of school belonging and optimistic future expectations - predict educational trajectories when controlling for the effect of socioeconomic resources? And, second, do these psychological resources compensate for lacking socioeconomic resources or do they reinforce the influence of socioeconomic resources on educational trajectories? We used data from a 15-year-long Swiss panel study (N = 1989) and investigated educational trajectories concerning individuals' transitions from lower-secondary to academic upper-secondary education, and from there to university. Findings indicated that both socioeconomic and psychological resources were significantly associated with individuals' probability of transitioning to academic upper-secondary education. We also uncovered some evidence of resource compensation between socioeconomic resources and future expectations, suggesting that optimistic expectations may buffer the adverse effect of scarce socioeconomic resources on educational attainment. Furthermore, we found that both the sense of school belonging and future expectations were significantly associated with individuals' probability of transitioning to university. Overall, we conclude that psychological resources play a critical role in academically oriented educational trajectories and that they may partly compensate for the effects of limited socioeconomic resources on these trajectories.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Origins, belonging, and expectations: assessing resource compensation and reinforcement in academic educational trajectories |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/sf/soae113 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae113 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | life course; education; inequality/social stratification |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10221300 |
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