Gender, parental education and ability: their interacting roles in predicting GCSE success

Glaesser, J.; Cooper, B.

doi:10.1080/0305764x.2012.733346

Gender, parental education and ability: their interacting roles in predicting GCSE success

Glaesser, J.; Cooper, B.

Authors

J. Glaesser

B. Cooper

Abstract

We investigate the relations between gender, parental education, ability, and educational achievement in Britain, focusing on the way in which gender and parental education interact with ability to contribute to a pupil’s obtaining secondary school qualifications. This allows us to provide evidence relevant to claims concerning the effects of differences in the way in which working- and middle-class familial cultures interact with gender-specific behaviour in school. Given the configurational nature of the processes likely to be involved, we employ Ragin’s Qualitative Comparative Analysis as our method. We find that, in both academically selective and non-selective schools, high ability is a quasi-sufficient condition for obtaining certain levels of qualification, but that at lower levels of ability, either being female or having highly educated parents (or both) have to be present, too. Boys without highly educated parents perform less well than girls from a similar background.

Citation

Glaesser, J., & Cooper, B. (2012). Gender, parental education and ability: their interacting roles in predicting GCSE success. Cambridge Journal of Education, 42(4), 463-480. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764x.2012.733346

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Dec 1, 2012
Deposit Date	Mar 7, 2012
Publicly Available Date	Jun 6, 2014
Journal	Cambridge Journal of Education
Print ISSN	0305-764X
Electronic ISSN	1469-3577
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	42
Issue	4
Pages	463-480
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764x.2012.733346
Keywords	Gender, Parental education, Ability, GCSE, Selective schools, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Britain.

Files

Published Journal Article (198 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2012 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.