Anthony F. Heath

Social origins, school type and higher education destinations

To what extent and why do social origins matter for access to higher education, including access to elite universities? What is the role of private and selective schooling? This paper uses the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to analyse the trajectories of a generation currently in early middle age. We find that the influence of social origins, especially parental education, remains when both a wide range of cognitive measures and school attainment are controlled. Attending a private school is powerfully predictive of gaining a university degree, and especially a degree from an elite institution, while grammar schooling does not appear to confer any advantage.

Opportunities and challenges in the expansion of cross-national survey research

Past decades have witnessed significant expansion in the reach of public opinion surveys. While the need for comparable data from increasingly heterogeneous countries has led some to infer that survey practices must be centralized and identical, the explicit inclusion of variation between countries may well improve the enterprise of cross-national research. This paper examines some of the challenges endemic to the continued global spread of cross-national research, both at the level of cross-national survey bodies and the analyst using second-hand data. With regard to the former, we examine recent changes in the ‘product’ of comparative survey research, and the increasing recognition that improvements in both survey quality and equivalence of meaning may come from localized understandings and specifications. We also explore how individual analysts might provide important substantive and methodological insights into the broader enterprise of comparative work, further advancing decolonized methodologies by devolving methodological innovation from survey developers located in prosperous countries to analysts with second-hand data spread across a broader geography.

Framing Higher Education: Questions and Responses in the British Social Attitudes Survey, 1983-2010.

This article focuses on questions and attitudes towards higher education in the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series. First, we analyse the changing BSA questions (1983–2010) in the context of key policy reports. Our results show that changes in the framing of higher education questions correspond with changes in the macro-discourse of higher education policies. Second, we focus on the 2010 BSA survey responses to investigate how attitudes towards higher education are related to respondents’ characteristics. Respondents’ socio-economic position predicts attitudes towards higher education. Graduates and professionals are most likely to support a reduction in higher education opportunities, but those who have so far benefitted least from higher education are supportive of expansion. One interpretation – with potential implications for social mobility – is that those who have already benefited from higher education are most inclined to pull the ladder up behind them.

Predicting support for collective action in the conflict between Turks and Kurds: Perceived threats as a mediator of intergroup contact and social identity

Two studies investigated the role of perceived realistic and symbolic threats in predicting collective action tendencies, and in mediating effects of intergroup contact and social identity on collective action in the context of an intractable conflict. Extending earlier research on collective action, integrated threat theory, and intergroup contact theory, we tested whether realistic and symbolic threats would predict collective action tendencies and outgroup attitudes; and mediate the effects of intergroup contact and social identity on collective action tendencies and outgroup attitudes among the advantaged, Turks, and the disadvantaged, Kurds. Findings from both studies (Study 1, N = 289 Turks; Study 2, N = 209 Kurds) supported the predictive and mediating role of threats on collective action tendencies and outgroup attitudes. Overall findings suggest that advantaged and disadvantaged groups might not always have disparate psychologies regarding collective action and incorporating perceived threats as antecedents of collective action can help to explain collective action tendencies among both groups especially in conflictual contexts.