| Emily Beller
University of California, Berkeley
Explaining the relationship between family structure and children's educational outcomes: Conceptual and measurement issues
FINAL REPORT:
This research illustrates that common modeling strategies underestimate the importance of parental involvement and cultural resources as mechanisms that help explain the negative effects of family disruption and/or non-intact family structures on children's educational outcomes. While typical controls for socioeconomic status adequately account for economic differences between family types, they do not adequately measure differences in effects of cultural resources (indexed by parent education levels, or occupational prestige) between family types. This occurs because the effects of parent cultural resources are cumulative (e.g. the effect of two parents with college degrees is different than the effect of one). Further, unlike economic resources, the effects of cultural resources on children's attainment depend on parent child interaction. My research improves upon prior modeling strategies by including a) measures of the cultural resources of both present and absent parents and b) interaction effects between parent cultural resources and parent-child involvement. Doing so shows that when parent-child interaction is reduced, the slope (or strength) of the beneficial effect of a parent's cultural resources is comparatively weak (this is the flip side of the argument that the beneficial impact of parent-child interaction is stronger in advantaged families where parents have greater cultural resources). Empirically, family disruption tends to result in reduced interaction with the non-residential parent. Thus, reduced parent-child interaction and its effect on the intergenerational transmission of parental educational resources is a key mechanism underlying the negative effects of non-intact family forms on children's educational attainment. These findings suggest that a beneficial role could be played by policies promoting continued involvement of absent parents with their children, when possible.
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