Dissertation on Intergenerational Closure

Dissertation on Intergenerational Closure

My dissertation project is centered around the hypothesis that regular positive contact of parents of befriended children has positive impact on the child’s school success by allowing the parents to enforce norms more effectively. This hypothesis was proposed by James Coleman who observed differences in test scores between Catholic schools and non-confessional schools and attributed these differences on the denser parental networks and more homogenous norms in Catholic schools. I use data of the CILS4EU study to estimate models to test this hypothesis, because this study is the only study to my knowledge which has randomly selected complete class room networks of children and their parents as well as school grade indicators. Furthermore the parental network indicators are better suited than indicators of previous studies as they asked for regular behavior and not merely knowing other parents, which could indicate anything ranging from having met once when picking up their children to being best friends.

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Robert Birkelbach
Scientific employee, doctoral student

My research interests include analytical sociology, social networks and, Bayesian statistics.