Relational Analysis of Educational Belief Systems

• In Event: 34.096 - MTCC Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 34.096-7 - Beliefs and Social Contexts

Abstract

The study of belief systems, or how individuals understand and structure their attitudes, has rarely been applied to attitudes about education. Different belief systems may exist among the public, but standard analytical approaches ignore this by assuming all people structure their attitudes similarly. In this paper I use Correlational Class Analysis (Boutyline 2016) to look for different educational belief systems held by different segments of the American public. I then use multinomial regression to examine the association between political views, education, socioeconomic status and religion on the one hand and educational belief systems on the other. The analysis inductively identified four educational belief systems among the American public: standards versus well-rounded, comprehensive, (not) music and arts, and (not) soft skills.

Author

• David Diehl, Vanderbilt University