Social Origin and Conscientiousness – The Unequal Development of Focus

• In Event: 534 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Parental Effects and Socialization

Abstract

The personality trait conscientiousness is one of the most relevant non-cognitive skills for success in various domains of the life course, including health, employment and education. Recent studies showed that it could be important to research conscientiousness on the level of facets than on the level of traits, because they are of different relevance in different contexts: While the facet focus has proved to be important in the context of learning and education the facet orderliness was not. Besides, facets are more compatible to the existing research on social stratification and mobility than traits. So the development of specific facets becomes an issue for inequality research and this article is explicitly examining the development of the relevant facet of focus. Therefore two pathways for personality development are examined: If the development of child’s focus is determined by parental personality (homologous transmission) and/or by social origin (social stratification). For the analysis panel-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; v29) is used including information of children at the age of 2-3 and 5-6 and their mothers. By estimating autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation models evidence could be found that focus is highly influenced by mother’s education and that this influence is even stronger than the effect of mother’s personality. Besides it could be shown, that child-centered parenting practices, similar as those involved in the child rearing strategy of concerted cultivation mediate the effect of mother’s education on the child’s focus to a small amount.

Author

• Till Kaiser, WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center