Single-parent family forms and children’s educational performance in a comparative perspective: effects of school’s share of single-parent families

Abstract

Living in a single-parent family is negatively related with children’s educational performance compared to living with 2 biological parents. In this article, we aim to find out to what extent the context of the school’s share of single-parent families affects this negative relationship. We use pooled data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), that is, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000 and 2003, which contain information on 209,300 students at 11,887 schools in 25 countries. We found that attending a school with more children from single-parent families affects the educational performance of all children negatively, but it particularly harms children from single-mother families. Furthermore, we have indications that in countries in which the number of single-parent families is higher, the negative effect of attending a school with a higher share of single-parent families decreases, except for the US.

Keywords:

• single-parent family
• educational performance
• cross-national comparison
• PISA data

Notes

1. The PISA 2006 wave did not contain any information about the single-parent family form of students. In PISA 2009, the family-form question has returned.

2. In the 2003 wave, the precise question was “Who usually lives at <home> with you? (a) Mother; (b) Other female guardian (e.g., stepmother or foster mother); (c) Father; (d) Other male guardian (e.g., stepfather or foster father); (e) Others (e.g. brother, sister, cousin, grandparents).” In the 2000 wave, more options were offered.

3. Although Japan, Turkey, and Korea are OECD countries that participated in PISA 2000 and 2003, we did not select these countries for our analyses because of the fact that divorce has a completely different meaning in these countries (see, e.g., Park, 2008, for Korea).

4. We also applied other techniques (separate analyses for the 10 plausible values [5 for each wave] and averaging the parameters), but these results are not substantially different.

5. Upon request, we provide the results for reading and scientific literacy as dependent variables. Effects of single-mother families are generally smaller on reading than on mathematics (Murray & Sandqvist, 1990), because mothers averagely stimulate language better than mathematics, while fathers, who generally can stimulate math development, are absent in single-mother families. But these results are not substantially different, only smaller. A possible explanation is that the various literacy tests, used by PISA, measure scholastic ability instead of literacy (Rindermann & Ceci, 2009).

6. The number of children in a family might, first of all, affect the likelihood that people divorce or separate. Second, growing up in a single-mother family without any siblings might have a different meaning compared to growing up with at least one or more siblings. As the number of siblings was only measured in PISA 2000 and was not even available for all students in that year, we decided not to control for this variable initially. However, the results of this additional analysis (on a smaller sample) show that the effect of growing up with a single mother does not change, and that the effect of growing up with a mother plus guardian is only slightly reduced. In addition, the effect of the school’s percentage of single-parent families is robust, as well as the effect of all other variables.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marloes de Lange

Marloes de Lange is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research interests include the sociology of education, labor markets, and family.

Jaap Dronkers

Jaap Dronkers was born in Amsterdam in 1945 and studied Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was Associate Professor of the Sociology of Education and Empirical Sociology at the Catholic University of Brabant in Tilburg (1986–1990), Chair in Educational Sciences (1990–1999), and Chair in Empirical Sociology (1999–2001) both at the University of Amsterdam. From 2001 until 2009, he was Professor of Social Stratification and Inequality at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. From December 2009, he has held the chair international comparative research on educational performance and social inequality at the Maastricht University.

Maarten H. J. Wolbers

Maarten H. J. Wolbers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He previously worked at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market, Maastricht University and the Department of Social Research Methodology, VU University Amsterdam. His research interests include the sociology of education, work, and labor markets.