Gerbert Kraaykamp

Race, cultural capital, and schooling: An analysis of trends in the United States

Using survey data on Blacks and Non-Hispanic Whites in 1982 and 1985, the authors examine the link between racial inequality in schooling and differences in cultural capital-the degree to which parents socialize their children into high-status culture. The findings indicate a significant increase in parental cultural capital across birth cohorts (from 1900 to 1960). That this increase has been faster among Blacks than among Whites and persists after Black-White differences are taken into account suggests a degree of racial integration in the cultural domain. The results also show that exposure to high-status culture is associated with higher levels of schooling and that the integration of Blacks into high-status culture has contributed to the Black-White convergence in schooling. The latter finding illustrates that cultural capital may serve as a route to upward mobility for less privileged minority groups.

Four Field-Related Educational Resources and Their Impact on Labor, Consumption, and Sociopolitical Orientation.

In modern societies, understanding the role of education in social inequality requires more than the study of the level of education attained. Attention should also be paid to the field of study in which people are educated. The authors propose that fields of study supply four types of resources to students: cultural, economic, communicative, and technical. Drawing on data from a nationally representative Dutch survey, they developed scales that measure the prevalence of these four types of resources across 11 fields of study. These scales are related to a wide range of variables in three domains: the labor market, consumption patterns, and sociopolitical orientations. Controlling for level of education, individuals who obtained many cultural resources more often participate in highbrow culture and attain a high cultural occupational status. Individuals who were trained in fields that provide economic resources are more materialistic and conservative in their behavior and attain high economic-status jobs. Those whose field of study attended to communicative qualities are more liberal in their sociopolitical orientation and participate more often in voluntary organizations. Technically educated people tend to have low occupational-status jobs and lifestyle preferences directly associated with their technical skills.

Literary socialization and reading preferences. Effects of parents, the library, and the school

In this article, I study the long-term effects of reading socialization in the parental home, the use that is made of the extensive supply of books in the library, and the cultural encouragement that takes place in secondary school. Employing representative data for the Netherlands in 1998 (N=1762), the first research question deals with a description of trends in reading promotion activities. In general, reading promotion has slightly increased in the Netherlands over the past five decades. There is an especially strong increase in parental promotion activities. Furthermore, use of library facilities at an early age has shown a sharp increase and secondary schools nowadays seem to pay more attention to the cultural education of their pupils than they used to. The second question deals with the effectiveness of reading promotion. The results indicate that if young people have experienced a great deal of attention to reading in their youth, this has a positive influence on their reading level in adult life. First, parents who read literature relatively often, as well as direct parental stimulation, have positive consequences for present reading levels. Second, people who in their youth were library members for a long time later have a stronger preference for literary books and suspense novels. Third, a cultural education in secondary school and the choice of an extensive humanitiesoriented set of finals seems particularly effective in stimulating pupils interest in literature. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Preferences in leisure time book reading: A study on the social differentiation in book reading for the Netherlands☆

In this study, we addressed the question of social differentiation in book reading preferences. Two theoretical insights are examined that explain why readers from the higher social classes prefer complex and prestigious books more than readers from the lower social strata. At first, membership in the higher social classes is seen as an indication for a persons cultural competence, and second, it is expected that people from the societys elite are more eager to demonstrate their high status background through reading. In our analyses, using a Dutch nationwide survey of book readers, we first examined the usability of a ranking procedure in which book genres and literary books were classified on the dimensions of complexity and literary prestige. Our results indicated that a reliable classification could be established through the method of expert evaluation. We used this classification of genres and literary books to obtain a valid measurement of a respondents book reading preferences. Second, we investigated to what extent aspects of readers could explain these preferences. Our findings showed that especially a higher educational level and the stimulation of literary reading in secondary school determined reading preferences for complex books. Furthermore, our analyses indicated that social motives of readers were of importance. Readers who emphasized the general value of literature, and readers with a high status best friend liked to read relatively complex books (even after factors of individual competence were taken into account). Our analyses gave rise to the more general conclusion that social differences in book reading were due to cultural competence factors, but also, and more surprisingly, to social status characteristics of readers.

Trends in leisure reading, forty years of research on reading in the Netherlands

Abstract Recent international research describes a diminishing interest in leisure reading for almost all western countries. In this article, we have investigated trends in leisure reading of the Dutch population between 1955 and 1995, using data from seven national representative time budget surveys. First, our results show that the time spent on reading has diminished by about half. The strongest decline, especially for books, was found during the initial phase of television (1955–1975). More specifically, the long-term decline in reading can be attributed to a shrinking portion of the population that reads on a regular basis. Second, with regard to differences between social categories, we observed a steeper decline for men than for women. In 1995, as a consequence, women on average read more than men. Also, we found that reading is in retreat through cohort replacement. Among the post-war generations, each newly entering five-year cohort spent a lower percentage of leisure time on reading than its immediate predecessor. Third, four possible explanations for the observed downward trend in reading were examined. The combination of paid work and domestic tasks among the post-war generations, and the increasing diversity in leisure activities, explained part of the observed decline. Also, the expansion of the supply of reading material seemed to have harmed appreciation of printed media to a certain degree. Competition from television turned out to be the most evident cause of the decline in reading. In this respect, individuals socialized in a culture of reading and printed matter (born before 1950), exhibited the lowest degree of reading replacement with television. Among these older generations, the higher educated have held on longest to leisure reading. These observed differences in substitution imply that the remaining group of readers, currently consists primarily of higher educated persons from the pre-war cohorts.

Parental education, children's performance and the transition to higher secondary education: Trends in primary and secondary effects over five Dutch school cohorts (1965-99)

According to Boudon, social background affects educational transitions as a result of differences in childrens academic performance (primary effects) and differences in transition probabilities given childrens level of academic performance (secondary effects). This study addresses historical changes in both primary and secondary effects on the educational transition from primary school to higher secondary education in The Netherlands. In addition, it considers changes over time in the relative importance of these effects. The study compares five cohorts of Dutch pupils, specifically those enrolling in secondary education in 1965, 1977, 1989, 1993 and 1999, and it employs counterfactual analyses. The main findings are that secondary effects have been stable and primary effects have fluctuated to some extent. As a result, the proportion of the total effect of social background accounted for by primary effects has increased somewhat, from 53 per cent to 58 per cent.

Subjective Well-Being in Rural India: The Curse of Conspicuous Consumption.

Using data on 697 individuals from 375 rural low income households in India, we test expectations on the effects of relative income and conspicuous consumption on subjective well-being. The results of the multi-level regression analyses show that individuals who spent more on conspicuous consumption report lower levels of subjective well-being. Surprisingly an individual’s relative income position does not affect feelings of well-being. Motivated by positional concerns, people do not passively accept their relative rank but instead consume conspicuous goods to keep up with the Joneses. Conspicuous consumption always comes at the account of the consumption of basic needs. Our analyses point at a positional treadmill effect of the consumption of status goods.

Parents, personality and media preferences

In this article, we elaborate on how media preferences are related to personality traits and parental socialization practices. Employing representative data for the Netherlands in 1998 (N=1.714), we first find that of the psychological traits, openness to experience is a substantial predictor of the interest in serious content within the media; open personalities favor complex content, on television and in books. Furthermore, popular reading is fancied relatively often by conscientious people, whereas emotionally instable and friendly personalities seem to prefer popular programs on television significantly more. Second, our results underscore the importance of measuring parental media socialization practices. Using retrospective information on the situation in the parental home during a persons upbringing, we find that imitation of preferences occurs for all media consumption activities. For instance, if parents liked popular television programs, this results in a corresponding preference of their children for popular programs, controlled for relevant other predictors. The same goes for popular and serious reading, and for serious television watching. So, the idea of a modeling of media preferences by parents finds support. Third, our analyses clearly show that an investigation of media audiences must differentiate between contents. In predicting media preferences we noticed that content similarities are more evident than medium similarities.

Dropout and downward mobility in the educational career: An event-history analysis of ethnic schooling differences in the Netherlands

While many aspects of educational careers have been examined ill the literature on ethnic minorities, such as truancy, turnover and grades, downward mobility has rarely been studied. Using data on more than 10,000 students who entered secondary school in The Netherlands in 1989, we develop an event-history model for secondary school careers and we use this model to analyse the determinants of dropout and downward mobility simultaneously. Our findings show that students from Mediterranean and Caribbean immigrant families are about 3 times as likely to drop out from secondary school without a degree compared to Dutch children. They are also more likely to be downwardly mobile during their secondary school career, but this differential is weaker Compositional differences with respect to individual ability and parental resources explain a large part of these differences. When holding constant parental resources and individual ability, ethnic students are less likely to experience downward mobility than Dutch students. In other words, when there is failure in the school career Dutch children are more likely to follow the route of downward mobility whereas children from ethnic minorities are more likely to drop out altogether. The multitrack nature of the Dutch educational system thus may have a negative impact on ethnic inequality.

Religious Involvement, Religious Context, and Self-Assessed Health in Europe

In the present study, the authors examine the extent to which effects of individual religious involvement on self-assessed health are influenced by the religious context (i.e., religious involvement at the country level). The authors test their expectations using individual level data (N = 127,257) on 28 countries from the European Social Surveys (2002–2008). Results of multilevel analyses show that individual religious attendance is positively related to self-assessed health in Europe. Protestants appear to feel healthier than Catholics. Moreover, modeling cross-level interactions demonstrates that religious denominations at the national level are influential: The health advantage of Protestants as compared to Catholics is greater as the percentage of Protestants in a country is higher, yet smaller as countries have a higher percentage of Catholics. The association between religious attendance and self-assessed health does not depend on the national level of religious attendance.