Educational tracking and sense of futility: a matter of stigma consciousness?

Abstract

During the past decade, both qualitative and quantitative research have documented strong feelings of fatalism amongst pupils enrolled in technical and vocational tracks in secondary education. Whereas those feelings have been shown to predict decreased school involvement and school misconduct, relatively little is known about their exact origins. In this paper, we explore to what extent they should be considered a stigma consciousness caused by the demeaning impact of perceived contempt to which pupils from technical and vocational tracks are exposed. Data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study from Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, N: 1967) were used to explore the distribution and consequences of perceived contempt with regard to one’s choice of study. About 20% of the pupils enrolled in technical and vocational education reported that some people looked down on them due to their studies. Moreover, even after taking into account different ability measures and social background characteristics, a strong direct relationship remained between perceived contempt and feelings of futility. In the conclusion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.

Keywords:

• sense of futility
• stigma consciousness
• tracking
• IEA data
• International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS)

Notes

1. Besides those tracks, there is also special secondary education for children with either a physical or mental disability. This form of education is not represented in the sample used here.

2. This initiative was taken solely by the Flemish government making it impossible to study this issue from a comparative perspective.

3. The model was estimated using Winmira2001. The goodness of fit was estimated through bootstrapping with 500 samples. The empirical estimators for the Rasch-analysis are: Pearson Chi²: 502.53 (p = 0.12) and the Cressie-Read Chi²: 486.63 (p = 0.16) (Read & Cressie 1988).

4. Pearson Chi^²: 548878243.76 (p = 0.09) and the Cressie-Read Chi²: 362851.51 (p = 0.45) (Read & Cressie, 1988; Von Davier, 2001).