Social and Personal Identities: Their Influence on Scholastic Effort

Abstract

When analysing the influence of identity on the motivations of scholastic effort, it is crucial to consider both social and personal identities. A child's social identity can be shaped by family background through the transmission of parental values vis-à-vis educational aspirations and achievements. As to personal identity, children may show a different locus of control over the successes and failures of their scholastic effort. In this paper, I develop an in-depth analysis of these aspects of social and personal identities and the nature of their interaction, and consider their influence on a child's effort in school through a theoretical model. Overall, the results from the model show that a (non-)pro-school social identity influenced by family background and locus of control along with their antagonistic or complementary interaction play a key role in determining children's scholastic effort by influencing their motivations.

Keywords::

• scholastic effort
• educational achievements
• social identity
• personal identity

JEL Classifications::

• I20
• I29

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Wilfred Dolfsma and Michael Carr for their remarkable help and, in particular, for their valuable and constructive suggestions, which allowed a substantial improvement of the paper. I also thank Niall O'Higgins and Paolo Vinci for their comments.

Notes

¹ The complete expression for marketable skills is but for simplicity we normalise the wage w to one.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppina Autiero

Giuseppina Autiero holds a Ph.D. (University of Napoli Federico II) and an MA (University of Sussex, UK) in Development Economics. She is Associate Professor and teaches macroeconomics, institutional economics and economic growth at the University of Salerno. Her current research interests concern the role that institutions and culture play in the behaviour of economic agents.