Mediation effects in the relationship between cultural capital and academic outcomes.

Following recent literature, this study focused on the mediating mechanisms through which cultural capital leads to students' higher grades and academic ability. Structural modeling was applied to 2018 CZ_PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) data and the results showed that students' family highbrow cultural resources and reading interest have indirect positive effects on their reading ability and school grades via non-cognitive skills (i.e., students' aspirations and self-concept in reading). The results also implied that only a negligible part of the relationship between students' cultural capital and school grades is mediated by teacher-student relationships, which partly questions the core idea of Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory. Still, the study suggests that there could be a significant relationship between student's beaux-arts consumption and their reading skills, however, this association could be rather indirect and mediated by student's educational aspirations and self-concept in reading. Finally, the results did not reveal any substantial differences in the mediating mechanism for male and female or low-status and high-status students.

The cross-country and cross-time measurement invariance of positive and negative affect scales: Evidence from European Social Survey.

Survey-based measures of subjective well-being are increasingly often analyzed cross-culturally. However, international comparison of these measures requires measurement invariance. Therefore, the major goal of this study is to investigate the cross-country and cross-time comparability of the 4-item positive and 7-item negative affect scales used in European Social Survey Round 3 (2006) and Round 6 (2012). This study applies both the traditional exact and the more recent Bayesian approximate approach to assess whether the affect scales are measurement invariant. The approximate approach detected several non-invariant items that are problematic for cross-national comparison and should be dropped from the scales. Consequently, measurement invariance was established in all countries over the two rounds for the reduced scales, allowing researchers to meaningfully compare their latent mean scores and the relationships with other theoretical constructs of interest. Thus, the study highlights the advantages of using multiple indicators and the necessity of measurement invariance testing in subjective well-being research.