Upward mobility or status maintenance? Status striving and educational decisions according to social origin and migration background

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Birgit Becker; Dr. Thomas Zimmermann
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541560462

The proposed project examines the perceptions of parents with 6-10-year-old children regarding their child's future social status (desire for status maintenance vs. desire for upward mobility). We analyze to what extent the desire for status maintenance vs. desire for upward mobility differs by socioeconomic status (SES) and migration background and what role this status striving plays for parents' educational aspirations and the educational decisions made in the families. For the concept of status striving, we refer to rational choice theories that consider the motivation for intergenerational status maintenance as a central mechanism for socially stratified educational decisions. In contrast, the desire for upward mobility is theoretically less relevant. These theoretical assumptions are rarely questioned, although there are hints in the literature that the desire for upward mobility is crucial for educational decision-making in some social groups. However, an empirical investigation of the theoretical assumptions (the desire for status maintenance outweighs the desire for status advancement) is difficult because existing operationalizations of status striving often fail to differentiate between striving for status maintenance and status advancement. Moreover, it is often neglected that "social status" is a multidimensional concept, and it is unclear which relative importance the different dimensions of the concept (education, prestige, income) have for the educational decisions of different social groups. We, therefore, plan a theoretical reconceptualization of families' status striving, to develop and extensively test appropriate measurement instruments for this concept, and to empirically analyze sociological questions on the distribution of status striving according to SES and migration background as well as on the (differential) effects of different forms of status striving on educational decisions. We plan extensive pretests combining quantitative and qualitative methods to test the newly developed instruments. After this instrument development, the data collection will be based on a register sample of parents with 6-10-year-old children via an online survey. In addition to comprehensive analyses of this primary data, we plan a complementary secondary analysis with data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) to investigate the long-term effects of status striving.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants