Project

educational institutions; primary and secondary effects; educational inequality; Switzerland; international comparison; decomposition of nonlinear models

Active participation

Title	Year

Switzerland, as most western capitalist countries, considers itself a meritocracy, and thus, social inequality that is caused by different social background, given equal effort, is considered unacceptable. Nonetheless inheritance of social positions is still strong in Switzerland (see Becker 2010 and Schumann 2011 for the most recent research). To reduce institutional barriers and enhance chances of underprivileged children, it is important to understand the impact of social background on educational achievement due to its key role in later status attainment. One of the most influential and clear-cut theoretical concepts for analyzing intergenerational transmission of educational inequality is Boudon's theory of primary and secondary effects (Boudon 1974). Due to several new decomposition techniques for nonlinear models it is now possible to estimate the relative magnitudes of primary and secondary effects. Although some studies on primary and secondary effects exist for several European countries, such research is lacking for Switzerland. Additionally, a convincing analysis of how primary and secondary effects change over sequential educational transitions has not yet been conducted. Further, the magnitude of primary and secondary effects varies significantly across published studies. This could be caused by different operationalization of the key variables (social background, assessment of students' ability, educational decisions), by the use of different statistical decomposition methods, by the fact that the studies look at different educational transitions and effects might change across transitions, or by diverging institutional arrangements such as differences in the educational systems. To disentangle methodological effects from institutional ones, I will first evaluate the extent to which the estimates of primary and secondary effects depend on different operationalizations and statistical methods. Second, I plan to analyze how primary and secondary effects change over sequential educational transitions in Switzerland. Third, to estimate the effect of various characteristics of educational institutions (e.g. the point in time when students are tracked, the extent of tracking, standardization of the curriculum, extent of public financial support, etc.), I will conduct an analysis using institutional variation at the cantonal level in Switzerland. Fourth, as a subsequent step to point 3, I will determine the magnitude of primary and secondary effects in an international comparison while taking into account countries’ different educational institutions. Finally, because the explanatory power of observational studies is always limited, I will evaluate educational decisions experimentally employing so-called “choice experiments”. The goal of this experimental study is to gain a deeper knowledge of the causal mechanisms behind the secondary effects.