Sibship Size and Gendered Resource Dilution in Different Societal Contexts (original) (raw)
Related papers
The History of the Family
This special section contains a collection of articles that study how children are affected by their sibship size and composition by examining their influence on several demographic outcomes across time and space. The importance of the specific historical context, as put forward by the conditional or gendered resource dilution model, seems to be justified, as inheritance practices and gender preferences were determining demographic outcomes. While these studies provide us with the possibility of reflecting on what kinds of pathways/mechanisms are behind sibling effects, they also demonstrate that much more can and should be investigated.Four recommendations for future studies are formulated: (1) future studies should continue on the same path as the articles in this special section and address different outcomes in a variety of contexts to determine under which conditions siblings matter for life transitions and demographic outcomes; (2) theoretical frameworks from different disciplines should be integrated to increase knowledge exchange; (3) researchers should think more about, and be transparent about, how siblings and families are defined; and (4) qualitative studies should be included to a greater extent, since quantitative studies alone cannot answer the questions we have about how and why sibling effects influence life transations and outcomes.
Growing up with many siblings, at least in the context of modern post-industrial low fertility, low mortality societies, is predictive of relatively poor performance on school tests in childhood, lower levels of educational attainment, and lower income throughout adulthood. Recent studies further indicate these relationships hold across generations, so that the descendants of those who grow up with many siblings are also at an apparent socioeconomic disadvantage. In this paper we add to this literature by considering whether such relationships interact with the sex and relative age of siblings. To do this we utilise a unique Swedish multigenerational birth cohort study that provides sibling configuration data on over 10,000 individuals born in 1915-1929, plus all their direct genetic descendants to the present day. Adjusting for parental and birth characteristics, we find that the 'socioeconomic cost' of growing up in a large family is independent of both the sex of siblings and the sex of the individual. However, growing up with several older as opposed to several younger siblings is predictive of relatively poor performance on school tests and a lower likelihood of progression to tertiary education. This later-born disadvantage also holds across generations, with the children of those with many older siblings achieving lower levels of educational attainment. Despite these differences, we find that while individual and descendant income is negatively related to the number of siblings, it is not influenced by the relative age of siblings. Thus, our findings imply that the educational disadvantage of later-born children, demonstrated here and in numerous other studies, does not necessarily translate into reduced earnings in adulthood. We discuss potential explanations for this pattern of results, and consider some important directions for future research into sibling configuration and wellbeing in modern societies.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2009
Son-preferring parents tend to continue to have babies until a son's birth. After deciding the set of children, the parents with resource constraints may divert family sources from daughters to a son. Thus, the presence of a son, relative to a daughter, have 2 distinct effects on his sister's educational outcomes: the direct effect while holding constant family size and the indirect effect through decreasing family size. Previous estimates of the direct effect take family size as an exogenous and predetermined covariate, and assume the indirect effect to be captured by the main effect of family size. However, family
The effects of family structure on the educational attainment of siblings in Hungary
1995
Abstract In this article we examine the impact of family structure on educational attainment in Hungary. Using a data-set collected in 1983 with information on all siblings of 17146 primary respondents, the effects of family size, birth order, and spacing were investigated. Hypotheses on these effects were based on sibling resource-dilution theory, which was modified for the case of Hungary, where educational policy has weakened the effects of parents' material resources.
Sibling Similarity and Difference in Socioeconomic Status: Life Course and Family Resource Effects
2005
For decades, geneticists and social scientists have relied on sibling correlations as indicative of the effects of genes and environment on behavioral traits and socioeconomic outcomes. The current paper advances this line of inquiry by exploring sibling similarity across a variety of socioeconomic outcomes and by providing answers to two relatively under-examined questions: do siblings'' socioeconomic statuses diverge or converge across the life course? And do siblings from demographic groups that putatively differ on the degree of opportunity they enjoy vary with respect to how similar they turn out? Findings inform theoretical debates over parental investment models, especially in relation to diverging opportunities and capital constraints, and life course status attainment models. We report three new findings. First, sibling resemblance in occupational prestige is explained almost entirely by shared education, and sibling resemblance in family income is explained almost entirely by the combination of shared education, occupational prestige, and earnings. This is contrasted to sibling resemblance in earnings and wealth, as siblings retain 60 percent of their resemblance in earnings once we control for education and occupational prestige, and siblings retain more than 30 percent of their resemblance in wealth once we control for all other socioeconomic outcomes. Second, across the life course, siblings converge in earnings and income and maintain stable correlations in education, occupational prestige, and wealth. Third, black siblings have significantly lower correlations on earnings and income than nonblack siblings overall, but black siblings dramatically converge in income across the life course -in their twenties black siblings have a .181 correlation in income and above age 40 they have a .826 correlation in income -suggesting almost complete social reproduction in income by the fifth decade of life for African Americans. This pattern does not hold for nonblack siblings. Furthermore, when we split the sample by class and age, we find the opposite effect: by age 40 and above, siblings from higher SES families tend to increase in their resemblance while those from lower SES families do not. Descriptive accounts about the openness of American society, then, strongly depend on which group we are talking about and at which stage in the life course we measure economic status.
Gender, family configuration, and the effect of family background on educational attainment
Biodemography and Social Biology, 1996
A comprehensive model of family influences on educational resemblance of siblings expands the traditional sibling pair model to a full sibship model in order to investigate how gender, gender composition of sibships, and a measure of o r d i i position moderate the effect of social origins on educational attainments of siblings. One common family factor is sufficient to explain the variation of educational attainment among brothers and sisters. Although effects of social origin variables on brothers are larger than on sisters, the relative effects of measured social origins are virtually the same among sisters and brothers. The disparity between educational attainments of brothers and sisters persists across sex composition and family size. Ordinal position does not alter the effects of social origins on educational attainment nor does it directly affect educational attainment. Father's and mother's education are equally important for all siblings regardless of birth order, gender composition, and family size.
Sibling correlations in terms of education, profession and earnings, in France
2017
This paper examines the contribution of family background to inequality in France by estimating sibling correlations in various measures of socio-economic success. Compared to often reported measures of intergenerational elasticity, the sibling correlation in socio-economic outcomes allows to capture a broader set of family influences. We use data from the French Education-Training-Employment (FQP) survey to investigate similarities between siblings in education, social prestige and earnings. We also investigate trends over time in sibling correlations and differences across family types in siblings' characteristics. Our results indicate a high degree of association in siblings' socio-economic success. The correlation is around 0.3 and 0.5 respectively for social prestige and years of education. The sibling correlation in annual earnings is around 0.4. All in all, this indicates that estimates of the intergenerational elasticity lead to underestimate the role of family backg...
Siblings and human capital: A comparison between Italy and France
This paper investigates how family size affects children's human capital, comparing Italy and France. We tested the dilution effect in these countries, starting with the assumption that the higher the number of siblings, the fewer parental resources are available for each child, and the lower the probability that each child will successfully pursue his/her educational career. We find a negative correlation between the number of siblings and human capital. However, when the analysis is developed with a causal approach, the strength of the dilution effect weakens in Italy and disappears in France.