New Working Papers on Sociology of Education

Two new working papers have recently been published by the HSE Sociology of Education and Science Laboratory. They were published as part of the "Education" series of the Basic Research Program.

Two new working papers have recently been published by the HSE Sociology of Education and Science Laboratory. They were published as part of the "Education" series of the Basic Research Program.

Vera Titkova, Valeria Ivanyushina, Daniel Alexandrov. "Sociometric popularity in a school context".

This study investigates how the sociometric popularity of schoolchildren is related to individual academic achievements in the context of different levels of academic culture and educational aspirations in the classroom. The sample includes 5058 students in 270 classes from 98 schools in St. Petersburg. To examine class-level effects, we employ multi-level hierarchical models using HLM 7 software. Different effects for boys and girls were found, indicating that the relationship between academic performance and popularity is gender-specific. The results demonstrate that in classes with a low learning motivation, the individual academic achievements of boys are negatively related to their popularity, while in classes with a high academic culture, the relationship is positive.

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Valeria Ivanyushina, Daniel Alexandrov. "Different levels of social organization in the formation of anti-school attitudes among adolescents".

This article analyzes the pro-school/anti-school attitudes of students on different levels and explores their relationship to educational outcomes. We examine the individual level, school level, and clique level predictors (a clique is defined as a tight social group within a class social network). Cliques were identified using specialist software called Kliquefinder. We used a multi-level regression approach on a sample of 7300 students from 104 public schools in St.Petersburg. Our findings show that: 1) The socio-economic differentiation of Russian schools does not lead to a polarization of pro-school/anti-school attitudes in different types of schools; 2) The polarization of attitudes emerges and is maintained at the clique level; and, 3) Clique attitudes have a significant impact on educational outcomes (net of a student’s socio-demographic characteristics and individual attitudes).

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