Students' Occupational Aspirations: Can Family Relationships Account for Differences Between Immigrant and Socioeconomic Groups?

Immigrant background and disadvantaged socioeconomic background are two key predictors of poorer school achievement in Europe. However, the former is associated with higher while the latter is associated with lower aspirations. This study asks whether family relationships account for this difference. Data come from 5,926 students in Germany and Sweden, eliciting indicators of family background and relationships at age 14-15 years (2011) and occupational aspirations 1 year later. High aspirations were found among students of non-European background and students with higher parental occupational status. Structural equation models showed that while immigrant families had greater parental aspirations and encouragement, family cohesion, and parental monitoring, only parental aspirations mediated the effects of family background.

Social Exclusion among Peers: The Role of Immigrant Status and Classroom Immigrant Density.

Increasing immigration and school ethnic segregation have raised concerns about the social integration of minority students. We examined the role of immigrant status in social exclusion and the moderating effect of classroom immigrant density among Swedish 14-15-year olds (n = 4795, 51 % females), extending conventional models of exclusion by studying multiple outcomes: victimization, isolation, and rejection. Students with immigrant backgrounds were rejected more than majority youth and first generation non-European immigrants were more isolated. Immigrants generally experienced more social exclusion in immigrant sparse than immigrant dense classrooms, and victimization increased with higher immigrant density for majority youth. The findings demonstrate that, in addition to victimization, subtle forms of exclusion may impede the social integration of immigrant youth but that time in the host country alleviates some risks for exclusion.

Trends in Child Poverty in Sweden: Parental and Child Reports.

We use several family-based indicators of household poverty as well as child-reported economic resources and problems to unravel child poverty trends in Sweden. Our results show that absolute (bread-line) household income poverty, as well as economic deprivation, increased with the recession 1991-96, then reduced and has remained largely unchanged since 2006. Relative income poverty has however increased since the mid-1990s. When we measure child poverty by young people's own reports, we find few trends between 2000 and 2011. The material conditions appear to have improved and relative poverty has changed very little if at all, contrasting the development of household relative poverty. This contradictory pattern may be a consequence of poor parents distributing relatively more of the household income to their children in times of economic duress, but future studies should scrutinze potentially delayed negative consequences as poor children are lagging behind their non-poor peers. Our methodological conclusion is that although parental and child reports are partly substitutable, they are also complementary, and the simultaneous reporting of different measures is crucial to get a full understanding of trends in child poverty.

The Social Consequences of Poverty: An Empirical Test on Longitudinal Data.

Poverty is commonly defined as a lack of economic resources that has negative social consequences, but surprisingly little is known about the importance of economic hardship for social outcomes. This article offers an empirical investigation into this issue. We apply panel data methods on longitudinal data from the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey 2000 and 2010 (n = 3089) to study whether poverty affects four social outcomes-close social relations (social support), other social relations (friends and relatives), political participation, and activity in organizations. We also compare these effects across five different poverty indicators. Our main conclusion is that poverty in general has negative effects on social life. It has more harmful effects for relations with friends and relatives than for social support; and more for political participation than organizational activity. The poverty indicator that shows the greatest impact is material deprivation (lack of cash margin), while the most prevalent poverty indicators-absolute income poverty, and especially relative income poverty-appear to have the least effect on social outcomes.

Microclass mobility: social reproduction in four countries.

In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms: a categorical form that has parents passing on a big-class position to their children or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing. These approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring opportunities from one generation to the next. In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big-class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.