Decomposing 'Social Origins': The Effects of Parents' Class, Status, and Education on the Educational Attainment of Their Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Divergent findings on trends in inequalities in educational attainment associated with individuals’ social origins have led to much discussion of how far these reflect real differences by place and time or, rather, differences in research procedures. But in this latter regard, one issue has received relatively little attention: i.e. that of the conceptualization and measurement of social origins. We propose decomposing social origins into parental class, parental status, and parental education. Following this approach, we analyse data from three British birth cohort studies. We show that these three components of social origins have independent and distinctive effects on educational attainment, and ones that persist or change in differing ways across the cohorts. We also make some assessment of their combined effects. We consider the methodological implications of our findings, in particular for analyses of trends in educational inequalities, and, further, how they might result from other, independently established, changes in social stratification in Britain over the historical period covered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".