Working Papers Series Educational Choices and Educational Traps Towards an Integration between Computational and Statistical Modelling in the Sociology of Social Stratification

From a substantive point of view, the paper analyzes the statistical association between individuals ’ educations and those of their parents in France and in Italy at the beginning of the twenty-first century – a phenomenon for which a comparison specifically focused on these two countries is still lacking. From a theoretical point of view, the paper develops a formal explanatory model of the macro-level structure of educational inequa-lity- the «interdependent educational choice model» (IECM)- which frames educational choices as the result of both individual benefit/cost evaluations and peer-group pressures. It thus enriches the sociological educational rational-choice approach through the eco-nomic perspective of the so-called «membership theory of inequality». (...) G e Wo P s Working papers du GEMASS Groupe d’étude des méthodes de l’Analyse sociologique de la Sorbonne ha ls h