Ethnic and Academic Identity: What Role for Children’s Scholastic Effort?

Abstract

Recent scholarly analysis has focussed on the role that ethnic identity plays in individual economic performances and particularly on how the identification with the culture of home and host countries influences immigrants’ and their children’s labour market outcomes. This paper focuses on the influence of ethnic and personal identity on adolescents’ scholastic effort. We partly draw on Akerlof and Kranton’s contributions in that they recognize the influence of social identity on children’s choice of effort. Nevertheless, in our model, ethnic and personal traits directly determines scholastic effort, which is in line with a strand of the psychology literature. An empirical model consistent with the theoretical one is estimated using the 1970 British Cohort Study, which contains information on how pupils see school and, hence, allows to derive an accurate measures of individual scholastic effort. It provides further useful information in order to identify relevant explanatory factors like the locus of control-characterizing personal traits—and to control for potentially confounding factors. The results corroborate the hypothesis that ethnicity and personal traits other than the socio-economic variables usually considered in the literature—play an important role in determining effort in school.

Keywords:

• scholastic effort
• ethnic identity
• locus of control
• discrimination

JEL classifications:

• I20
• I29
• Z10

Notes

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

² The variable e_i increases by 1 unit if the respondent does not share each of the statements 1–5; the index further increases by 1 unit if the respondent shares sentence 6. Therefore, a student fully engaged in academic tasks reports a score equal to 6; in the opposite case, s/he gets a score equal to 0. We obtained preliminary estimates- available on request—using different specifications of the dependent variable (e.g. the score reported on each sentence) but the results substantially were the same.

³ Another longitudinal study carried out in UK similar to the BCS70 study is the Millennium Cohort Study. Unfortunately, currently the data are available only from the sweep conducted at age 10.

⁴ In 1975 and 1980, the birth cohort was augmented by the inclusion of immigrants in Britain who were born in the target week in 1970.

⁵ For more details see: http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/Survey and Documentation/BCS70 Age 16 survey.

⁶ To this respect, this work could be a reference point in order to assess whether and to what extent orientations to integration and to schooling have changed in the last thirty years.

⁷ In our estimates, Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis are grouped as “Asians”; this wider aggregation does not affect our main findings (previous estimates are available on request). Religious differences and political contrasts however characterize the history of Bangladesh, Pakistan where Islam is largely diffused and India. European countries are quite homogeneous with respect to religion and to political institutions.

⁸ The questions capturing individual locus of control are the following: (1) “Do you feel that most of the time it's not worth trying hard because things never turns out right anyway?”; (2) “Are you the kind of person who believes that planning ahead makes things turn out better?”; (3) “When nice things happen to you, is it only good luck?”. Three answers were possible: “Yes”, “No”, “Don't know”. The variable increases by 1 unit if the respondent shares sentence (2) and increases by 1 unit when s/he does not share at all sentences (1) and (3) respectively.

⁹ In preliminary estimates we controlled for teenagers’ religious affiliation, for their country of birth and their present parents’ ethnic group in order to distinguish between first and second-generation immigrants but we did not report statistically significant evidence (the estimates are available on request). To this respect, it is important to note that most of non-UK teenagers-about 80%—were born in UK.

¹⁰ When we do not control for Home Language in Table 2, column I, Ethnicity has a stronger impact on the scholastic effort as the coefficient reported on Asians is 0.725 (std err. = 0.114), whereas the coefficient on West Indians is 0.389 and is statistically significant at 10% level (std. err. = 0.221).

¹¹ As previously specified, in the sixteen-year BCS sweep, sixteen separate survey instruments were employed and the response rate varies for the different questionnaires.

¹² Controlling for the socio-economic composition of peers’ families does not significantly improve the explanatory power of the model.