Policy Configuration and Cultural Capital: examining the number of books at home Latin America and the Caribbean’s international large-scale assessment

• In Event: Examining Public Policies, Curriculums, and Programs across the educational ecosystem in the LAC region

Proposal

According to Freire and Macedo (1987), literacy and reading are central to the emancipatory possibilities of people. Reading behavior and habits in students are accumulated under the notion of cultural capital, which generally is transmitted by parents and families, more than schools (Bourdieu,1990).

The number of books in the household is a measurement commonly used to approximate students' cultural capital at the international level, due to the “universality” of book ownership across countries (Hooper, 2022). This question has been empirically presented as a strong predictor of educational achievement (Hanushek & Woessman 2011) and is widely used globally as a proxy of cultural capital and socioeconomic background of students, particularly in Latin America (Pinto 2015; Abregu del Pino, 2018; Vicens Marí, 2021).

Over the last decade, the international literature has proposed methodological discussions about the nature of the report of the number of books in the household, focusing on its correlations to cultural and literacy practices (Sieben & Lechner, 2019), discrepancies between parents and children’s responses (Jerrim and Micklewright, 2014; Rutkowski and Rutkowski, 2010), and reporting endogeneity at the student level (Engzell, 2019). This global discussion has mainly drawn data from international assessments such as PISA, PIRLS, and TIMMS. Latin American countries are underrepresented in the groups of countries participating in these studies and there is very scarce literature on this topic that uses Latin American international large-scale assessments (ILSA), although these being available for more than two decades (the Primer Estudio Regional Comparativo de Educacion (LLECE/PERCE)’s first wave was on 1997).

Countries’ contexts provide strong dilemmas for questionnaires accompanying ILSA and credibility of the data is relevant for countries’ utilization of ILSA (Liu & Steiner-Khamsi, 2022). Studies in the Latin American context have shown that the policy configuration for literacy and publishing industries vary greatly across countries, and they can affect the cost and access to books (Fernandez-Vergara, 2019; 2021). Different access to publicly subsidized libraries, book taxation policies, and vouchers for public procurements, can directly affect the costs and economic book-related decisions made by families and students (Cameron, 2019). Under this heterogeneity across countries, the relationship between the number of books in the household and cultural capital might not be as straightforward as needed for international comparative analysis.

We use 2019 LLECE/ERCE (UNESCO) data and 2018 data from the Regional Center for Reading in Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLALC) to estimate multilevel-hierarchical models (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002) over the number of books in the household and its relationship with publishing and literacy policy indicators. Multilevel-hierarchical models are a preferred approach to analyzing ILSA data due to their potential to account for the nested structure of the data generated (Scherer, 2022).

Our findings suggest that there is heterogeneity across countries on the nature of the report of the number of books in the household, which is explained by book production and international book trading. As expected, parents' and children's report heterogeneity (standard deviations between 0.36 and 0.47) is explained by a country’s book production. In addition, the correlation between socioeconomic variables (such as family income or mother’s educational level) shows lower heterogeneity (SD=0.06 for parents and SD=0.03 for students) but is strongly explained by book publishing indicators. In some cases, the relationship between the number of books in the household and other socioeconomic variables is non-linear. Finally, discrepancies between parents' and children’s reports of the number of books in the household and children’s reports' relationship with language assessment scores also present variability across countries (SD=0.18 and SD=0.11 respectively), which follow trends of endogeneity present in PIRLS (Engzell, 2021).

Furthermore, we explore how specific policy configurations and book access are able to explain the proximity between the number of books in the household and cultural capital (e.g., Argentina's popular libraries and vouchers for book procurement; Mexico's subsidized State book publishing company; Colombia's public agency for reading and literacy; among others).

This article’s value is threefold: it starts a highly needed methodological discussion on the use of the number of books as a proxy variable in the Latin American international and comparative education literature; it empirically shows the heterogeneity of the number of books in the household as a measurement of cultural capital; and finally, it proposes explanations on how different policy configurations for publishing and literacy can affect the access to books in Latin America.

Inquiring about the methodological implications of measuring cultural capital and book access in Latin America could move forward the understanding of reading as an emancipatory ability for Latin American people.

Authors

• Andres Fernandez-Vergara, University of California, Los Angeles

• Alvaro Otaegui, UNESCO