A Dynamic Structural Equation Approach to Modeling Wage Dynamics and Cumulative Advantage across the Lifespan.

Wages and wage dynamics directly affect individuals' and families' daily lives. In this article, we show how major theoretical branches of research on wages and inequality-that is, cumulative advantage (CA), human capital theory, and the lifespan perspective-can be integrated into a coherent statistical framework and analyzed with multilevel dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM). This opens up a new way to empirically investigate the mechanisms that drive growing inequality over time. We demonstrate the new approach by making use of longitudinal, representative U.S. data (NLSY-79). Analyses revealed fundamental between-person differences in both initial wages and autoregressive wage growth rates across the lifespan. Only 0.5% of the sample experienced a "strict" CA and unbounded wage growth, whereas most individuals revealed logarithmic wage growth over time. Adolescent intelligence and adult educational levels explained substantial heterogeneity in both parameters. We discuss how DSEM may help researchers study CA processes and related developmental dynamics, and we highlight the extensions and limitations of the DSEM framework.

Meta-analyzing individual participant data from studies with complex survey designs: A tutorial on using the two-stage approach for data from educational large-scale assessments.

Descriptive analyses of socially important or theoretically interesting phenomena and trends are a vital component of research in the behavioral, social, economic, and health sciences. Such analyses yield reliable results when using representative individual participant data (IPD) from studies with complex survey designs, including educational large-scale assessments (ELSAs) or social, health, and economic survey and panel studies. The meta-analytic integration of these results offers unique and novel research opportunities to provide strong empirical evidence of the consistency and generalizability of important phenomena and trends. Using ELSAs as an example, this tutorial offers methodological guidance on how to use the two-stage approach to IPD meta-analysis to account for the statistical challenges of complex survey designs (e.g., sampling weights, clustered and missing IPD), first, to conduct descriptive analyses (Stage 1), and second, to integrate results with three-level meta-analytic and meta-regression models to take into account dependencies among effect sizes (Stage 2). The two-stage approach is illustrated with IPD on reading achievement from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We demonstrate how to analyze and integrate standardized mean differences (e.g., gender differences), correlations (e.g., with students' socioeconomic status [SES]), and interactions between individual characteristics at the participant level (e.g., the interaction between gender and SES) across several PISA cycles. All the datafiles and R scripts we used are available online. Because complex social, health, or economic survey and panel studies share many methodological features with ELSAs, the guidance offered in this tutorial is also helpful for synthesizing research evidence from these studies.

Unraveling the Relationship Between Teacher-Assigned Grades, Student Personality, and Standardized Test Scores.

The Big Five personality traits play a major role in student achievement. As such, there is consistent evidence that students that are more conscientious receive better teacher-assigned grades in secondary school. However, research often does not support the claim that students that are more conscientious similarly achieve higher scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests. Based on the Invest-and-Accrue Model, we argue that conscientiousness explains to some extent why certain students receive better grades despite similar academic accomplishments (i.e., achieving similar scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests). Therefore, the present study examines to what extent the relationship between student personality and teacher-assigned grades consists of direct as opposed to indirect associations (via subject-specific standardized test scores). We used a representative sample of 14,710 ninth-grade students to estimate these direct and indirect pathways in mathematics and German. Structural equation models showed that test scores explained between 8 and 11% of the variance in teacher-assigned grades in mathematics and German. The Big Five personality traits in students additionally explained between 8 and 10% of the variance in grades. Finally, the personality-grade relationship consisted of direct (0.02 | ß| ≤ 0.27) and indirect associations via test scores (0.01 | ß| ≤ 0.07). Conscientiousness explained discrepancies between teacher-assigned grades and students' scores in domain-specific standardized tests to a greater extent than any of the other Big Five personality traits. Our findings suggest that students that are more conscientious may invest more effort to accomplish classroom goals, but fall short of mastery.

Investigating core assumptions of the "American Dream": Historical changes in how adolescents' socioeconomic status, IQ, and GPA are related to key life outcomes in adulthood.

The present study examines how historical changes in the U.S. socioeconomic environment in the 20th century may have affected core assumptions of the "American Dream." Specifically, the authors examined whether such changes modulated the extent to which adolescents' intelligence (IQ), their grade point average (GPA), and their parents' socioeconomic status (SES) could predict key life outcomes in adulthood about 20 years later. The data stemmed from two representative U.S. birth cohorts of 15- and 16-year-olds who were born in the early 1960s (N = 3,040) and 1980s (N = 3,524) and who participated in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY). Cohort differences were analyzed with respect to differences in average relations by means of multiple and logistic regression and for specific points in each outcome distribution by means of quantile regressions. In both cohorts, IQ, GPA, and parental SES predicted important educational, occupational, and health-related life-outcomes about 20 years later. Across historical time, the predictive utility of adolescent IQ and parental SES remained stable for the most part. Yet, the combined effects of social-ecological and socioeconomic changes may have increased the predictive utility (that is, the regression weights) of adolescent GPA for educational, occupational, and health outcomes over time for individuals who were born in the 1980s. Theoretical implications concerning adult development, aging, and late life inequality are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).