Browsing by Subject "Educational attainment"

Examining how structural and cultural factors shape postsecondary educational outcomes is at the heart of sociological research in education. However, although there has been a rich history in exploring these sociological concepts in education, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), this study extends existing research in the sociology of education by addressing two research questions that relate to how social structure and culture predict youths’ future postsecondary educational outcomes.

Pertaining to structural explanations of educational outcomes, I examine the first research question: do black youth benefit less from increases in their parents’ social class status on their college enrollment and educational attainment. Classic and contemporary studies show greater social class status is associated with higher levels of education for youth. However, racialized processes might constrain the benefits blacks receive from increases in parents’ social class. Therefore, I analyze whether race moderates the relationship between youths’ social class status during high school and two measures of postsecondary educational outcomes: (1) college enrollment two years post-high school and (2) educational attainment eight years post-high school. Results suggest black youth receive lower benefits from social class than whites for both outcomes, and parents’ gender plays a role in the racial differences in the link between social class and both outcomes.

Pertaining to cultural explanations of educational outcomes, I examine the second research question: does within-school variation in school culture during high school predict future college enrollment. Although many studies examine the role school culture—measured as the within-school average in schooling behaviors or beliefs—plays in shaping high school students’ decisions to attend college, few studies investigate how within-school variation in culture predicts college enrollment. Therefore, I analyze whether an association exists between college enrollment two years post-high school and within-school variation in school culture. Results suggest that students in public and private schools are less likely to enroll in college after attending a high school with greater within-school variation in culture. Results from this research question combined with the results of the first research question have implications for the study of structural and cultural factors in education research.

Research into how different life events shape individual religiosity has a long history within sociology. However, some scholars have begun to question whether research in this area has methodologically justified making strong causal claims. In an effort to re-center religion within the field of sociological concerns, quantitative sociologists of religion have tended to over-state the meaning of their statistical relationships and this has led to many of their causal assumptions being unstated and/or untested in their analyses. The advances in causal statistical modeling and counterfactually grounded analyses has led to the development of statistical models that are better able to establish causal relationships. It is time to begin implementing these approaches within the sociology of religion. This more rigorous statistical approach runs the risk of demonstrating that social life’s influence on religion may be less impressive than was previously thought. But researchers in this area must take this risk to develop a better sense of the real effects of society on religion. This in turn will provide a better foundation for developing theories of religion’s role in our modern world.

One way in which sociologists of religion can improve their causal modeling strategies is through the use of longitudinal data and methods. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the availability of large-scale longitudinal data that collects information on respondents’ religious belief, practice, and belonging. With these data, scholars interested in religious change can move away from their reliance on comparing individuals to one another – a constraint of cross-sectional data – and begin to analyze how certain life course events may lead to change in individual religiosity. I revisit two important areas within the sociology of religion –the relationship between family formation and religious service attendance and the effects of educational achievement on religious beliefs and practices – to assess whether these relationships can be considered causal in light of results from longitudinal statistical models. By implementing longitudinal models, I am able to directly assess whether between-individual differences or individual change over time is driving the statistical relationships found in my analyses. I will show that the story we thought we knew about how religion responds to family formation and educational attainment changes when these additional statistical tests are brought to bear on the data.