Gender, family configuration, and the effect of family background on educational attainment

ABSTRACT: 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 educa-tional 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. We propose a social-structural model of family influence on educa-tional resemblance among siblings. It expands the traditional sibling pair model to include full sibships. In this way, we can show how gender, gender composition of sibship, and birth order moderate the effect of social origins on educational attainment. Thus, the model builds on recent studies of sib-and Johnson, 1984; Hauser and Wong, 1989; DeGraaf and Huinink, 1992). Second, researchers are interested in differences between siblings; they look at the influence of variables on which siblings do not have common values, for example, birth order, sex, and birt