published together with Maja Coradi Vellacott as 'Sibling Rivalry for Parental Resources: A Problem for Equity in Education? A Six-Country Comparison with PISA Data' in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie / Swiss Journal of Sociology /Revue suisse de sociologie , 2003, 29 (3), 377-398
In this paper we analyse with the PISA data on literacy achievement of fifteen-year-old pupils
in six member countries of the OECD, whether the fact of having many siblings affects the
individual educational outcome. The hypothesis that we test is whether parents’ resources
matter for educational outcome. If they do and parents are constraint in their budgets,
siblings will rival for the limited parental resources and thereby negatively affect educational
outcome. The hypothesis is tested by regressing the literacy achievement on the number of
siblings within a family and also by regressing directly forms of parental resources on the
family size. We find significant family size effects in all six countries analysed but we also find
significant differences in the effects between countries. Although sibling rivalry is relevant in
all countries, it seems that some countries can compensate better than others and thereby
achieve higher equity in the educational system.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.