Factors in educational exclusion: including the voice of the youth

The processes of educational exclusion are multiple and diverse. Research has shown that exclusion from school goes far beyond access. It is associated with crucial issues related to educational processes (belonging, recognition or representation) and results (knowledge or certificates). The objective of this article is to delve into the analysis of factors in educational exclusion, including the voice of the youth, as a key element in understanding these factors. The article begins with a literature review addressing the meaning, mechanisms and profiles of educational exclusion. It then presents qualitative fieldwork, consisting of six focus groups of young people (aged 14–24) who have been excluded from mainstream educational institutions in Barcelona, Spain. The results of the empirical analysis point to four critical elements in the process of educational exclusion as experienced by the youth: educational transitions; the role of teachers; the impact of grouping practices and disciplinary mechanisms; and the contrast between mainstream educational institutions and alternative learning arenas. By including the voice of the youth, the article provides a better understanding of the factors contributing to educational exclusion so as to advance in the construction of an educational system able to guarantee students’ right to learn and succeed in school.     

Capital limits: social class,motivations for term-time job searching and the consequences of joblessness among UK university students

Youth unemployment figures include large numbers of full-time students, yet student joblessness receives very little academic attention, especially at a qualitative level. Despite being relatively less deleterious than youth unemployment more broadly, we show that student unemployment remains an important site for the practice and reinforcement of social inequality. Using a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interviews with 27 undergraduate students who have been unsuccessful in term-time job searching, we expose some of the limits to the extent that social and cultural capital can be converted into positive employment outcomes. Importantly, the data reveal that it is (lack of) access to material and economic resources that is most significant in ensuring that both the experience of unemployment and, concomitantly, the experience of university, in yet another way, remain highly structured by social class. These divisions shape the imperative and timing of the need to work, and also underpin nuances in respect of desires and needs in how students talk about their motivations for part-time work. These should be important considerations if policy-makers want to create a genuinely meritocratic system or deliver equitable psychological and material well-being.     

Why have relative rates of class mobility become more equal among women in Britain?

In a previous paper it has been shown that across three cohorts of men and women born in Britain in 1946, 1958 and 1970 a gender difference exists in regard to relative rates of class mobility. For men these rates display an essential stability but for women they become more equal. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the causes of this trend—or, that is, of increasing social fluidity—among women. We begin by considering a refined version of the perverse fluidity hypothesis: that is, one that proposes that part‐time work leads to increasing downward worklife mobility among women that also entails downward intergenerational mobility and thus promotes greater fluidity. We do in fact find that the increase in fluidity is very largely, if not entirely, confined to women who have had at least one period of part‐time work. However, a more direct test of the hypothesis is not supportive. We are then led to investigate whether it is not that part‐time working itself is the crucial factor but rather that women who subsequently work part‐time already differ from those who do not at entry into employment. We find that eventual full‐ and part‐timers do not differ in their class origins nor, in any systematic way, in their educational qualifications. But there is a marked and increasing difference in the levels of employment at which they make their labour market entry. Eventual part‐timers are more likely than eventual full‐timers to enter in working‐class positions, regardless of their class origins and qualifications. Insofar as these women are from more advantaged origins, they would appear not to seek to exploit their advantages to the same extent as do full‐timers in order to advance their own work careers. And it is, then, in the downward mobility accepted by these women—who increase in number across the cohorts—that we would locate the main source of the weakening association between class origins and destinations that is revealed among women at large.     

Academic Undermatch: How General and Specific Cultural Capital Structure Inequality

Recent literature has added another dimension to the well‐documented patterns of social class inequality in education: academic undermatch. Undermatch (which occurs when students attend institutions of lower selectivity than they are academically qualified to attend) is both widespread and unequal, with students from less advantaged families more likely to undermatch. Although proliferating, the research on undermatch has focused primarily on documenting the extent of, and less on exploring the mechanisms underlying, undermatch. Moreover, this literature has developed largely independent of the sociological research on cultural capital. Therefore, when scholars consider underlying mechanisms, they often focus narrowly on college‐specific information, without considering the broader cultural context in which students are embedded. Drawing on the literature on undermatch, as well as the sociological research on cultural capital, I differentiate between general and specific cultural capital. Moreover, instead of simply estimating whether students undermatch or not, I consider different types of undermatch. Results from the Educational Longitudinal Survey reveal that the effects of cultural capital are indeed heterogeneous, both with respect to its relationship to undermatch and its contribution to social class inequality. Findings have important implications for understanding undermatch and the role of cultural capital in reducing and reproducing social inequality.     

Bivariate multilevel models for the analysis of mathematics and reading pupils' achievements

The purpose of this paper is to identify a relationship between pupils' mathematics and reading test scores and the characteristics of students themselves, stratifying for classes, schools and geographical areas. The data set of interest contains detailed information about more than 500,000 students at the first year of junior secondary school in the year 2012/2013, provided by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of Educational System. The innovation of this work is in the use of multivariate multilevel models, in which the outcome is bivariate: reading and mathematics achievement. Using the bivariate outcome enables researchers to analyze the correlations between achievement levels in the two fields and to predict statistically significant school and class effects after adjusting for pupil's characteristics. The statistical model employed here explicates account for the potential covariance between the two topics, and at the same time it allows the school effect to vary among them. The results show that while for most cases the direction of school's effect is coherent for reading and mathematics (i.e. positive/negative), there are cases where internal school factors lead to different performances in the two fields.     

Trace Class Markov Chains for Bayesian Inference with Generalized Double Pareto Shrinkage Priors

Bayesian shrinkage methods have generated a lot of interest in recent years, especially in the context of high‐dimensional linear regression. In recent work, a Bayesian shrinkage approach using generalized double Pareto priors has been proposed. Several useful properties of this approach, including the derivation of a tractable three‐block Gibbs sampler to sample from the resulting posterior density, have been established. We show that the Markov operator corresponding to this three‐block Gibbs sampler is not Hilbert–Schmidt. We propose a simpler two‐block Gibbs sampler and show that the corresponding Markov operator is trace class (and hence Hilbert–Schmidt). Establishing the trace class property for the proposed two‐block Gibbs sampler has several useful consequences. Firstly, it implies that the corresponding Markov chain is geometrically ergodic, thereby implying the existence of a Markov chain central limit theorem, which in turn enables computation of asymptotic standard errors for Markov chain‐based estimates of posterior quantities. Secondly, because the proposed Gibbs sampler uses two blocks, standard recipes in the literature can be used to construct a sandwich Markov chain (by inserting an appropriate extra step) to gain further efficiency and to achieve faster convergence. The trace class property for the two‐block sampler implies that the corresponding sandwich Markov chain is also trace class and thereby geometrically ergodic. Finally, it also guarantees that all eigenvalues of the sandwich chain are dominated by the corresponding eigenvalues of the Gibbs sampling chain (with at least one strict domination). Our results demonstrate that a minor change in the structure of a Markov chain can lead to fundamental changes in its theoretical properties. We illustrate the improvement in efficiency resulting from our proposed Markov chains using simulated and real examples.     

High‐order Corrected Estimator of Asymptotic Variance with Optimal Bandwidth

Estimation of time‐average variance constant (TAVC), which is the asymptotic variance of the sample mean of a dependent process, is of fundamental importance in various fields of statistics. For frequentists, it is crucial for constructing confidence interval of mean and serving as a normalizing constant in various test statistics and so forth. For Bayesians, it is widely used for evaluating effective sample size and conducting convergence diagnosis in Markov chain Monte Carlo method. In this paper, by considering high‐order corrections to the asymptotic biases, we develop a new class of TAVC estimators that enjoys optimal ‐convergence rates under different degrees of the serial dependence of stochastic processes. The high‐order correction procedure is applicable to estimation of the so‐called smoothness parameter, which is essential in determining the optimal bandwidth. Comparisons with existing TAVC estimators are comprehensively investigated. In particular, the proposed optimal high‐order corrected estimator has the best performance in terms of mean squared error.     

A simple approach to analyzing clustered longitudinal data

When modeling correlated binary data in the presence of informative cluster sizes, generalized estimating equations with either resampling or inverse-weighting, are often used to correct for estimation bias. However, existing methods for the clustered longitudinal setting assume constant cluster sizes over time. We present a subject-weighted generalized estimating equations scheme that provides valid parameter estimation for the clustered longitudinal setting while allowing cluster sizes to change over time. We compare, via simulation, the performance of existing methods to our subject-weighted approach. The subject-weighted approach was the only method that showed negligible bias, with excellent coverage, for all model parameters.     

我国中产阶层的规模、结构问题与发展对策

本文认为中产阶层不等于中等收入群体,应该从收入、职业和教育多个维度分析我国中产阶层的规模与结构。本文分析了中国综合社会调查（CGSS）2005年、2010年、2013年的数据,发现我国中等收入群体所占的比例已经较大,但真正意义上的中产阶层的比例仍然较小。中产阶层越来越集中于城市和东部地区,城乡之间、地区之间的社会结构差异越来越大,第一产业中的中产阶层发展也遇到了较大阻碍。本文认为,要壮大中产阶层,应该进一步增加居民收入,推动产业、职业结构调整,普及教育,推动农村地区、中西部地区中产阶层的发展,扶持农民工依靠技能提升、自主经营进入中产阶层。