Dissertation
Cultural Capital and the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap: a Cross-National Investigation
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005306
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three empirical studies that scrutinize the complex relationship between social class, cultural capital, and education by exploring avenues that extant research has largely omitted. These studies employ data from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a large-scale comparative study that provides internationally standardized assessments of academic achievement among 15-year-old children attending school in over 70 countries. The wide availability of variables on student achievement and cultural capital in the dataset helps address the unique research questions posed in the empirical chapters. The first study, Chapter 2, investigates the role of welfare regimes in shaping the relationship between cultural capital and the socioeconomic achievement gap. This chapter draws on the cultural reproduction and cultural mobility perspective in tandem with the welfare regime theory to assess how the two forms of cultural capital (static and dynamic) relate to academic achievement in three distinct welfare regimes. The second study, Chapter 3, investigates the socioeconomic gradient in cultural capital, and the role of national factors in affecting the gradient. The chapter identifies the importance of country-level factors affecting the social gradient in cultural capital, which is important from an equity standpoint. Finally, the third study, Chapter 4, examines the association between social class and test scores across the test score distribution, how this association is mediated by cultural capital, and how these relationships vary across three countries with distinct institutional features and welfare regimes. Drawing on arguments from competing theoretical models, these studies collectively further our understanding of the role of cultural capital in reproducing educational inequality cross-nationally.
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Details
- Title
- Cultural Capital and the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap
- Creators
- Namrata Ray
- Contributors
- Alair Maclean (Advisor)Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson (Committee Member) - Washington State UniversityAna Zamora (Committee Member) - Washington State University, Department of Sociology
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of Sociology
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 184
- Identifiers
- 99901031038501842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation