Title:
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Examining youth educational and occupational aspirations : sibling configuration and family background
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This thesis consists of three empirical studies, focusing on adolescents' educational
and occupational aspirations, and exploring in particular the influence of sibling
configuration and family background. In the first paper, we apply multilevel mod-
elling techniques to sibling data on further education aspiration and attainment
from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). We find that firstborn adoles-
cents are more likely to attend further education compared with their later-born
siblings; and adolescents with a wide age spacing among their siblings than those
in a close-spacing sibship. Further investigations show that the first born advantage in further education attainment can be partially explained by birth-order
differences in educational aspiration.
The second paper examines the effect of birth order on occupational aspiration.
Based on Holland's vocational themes, we find that firstborns are more likely
to aspire to investigative and conventional occupations, whereas their later-born
siblings prefer enterprising and artistic occupations. From a hierarchical perspective, the analysis reveals that firstborns have higher aspiration prestige scores.
The effects of birth order on occupational aspiration can be partially attributed
to birth-order differences in school performance.
In the third paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the dynamics of occu-
pational aspiration in adolescence using multilevel growth models. Our results
indicate that adolescents constantly adjust their occupational aspirations with
age, in line with the general labour market demand and particularly their own
cognitive ability. We find that adolescents with lower socioeconomic status (SES)
have lower initial occupational aspirations compared with their relatively privi-
leged peers. Further, the differences by SES increase with age, reflecting a growing
social class gap in adolescents' occupational aspirations.
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