The effects of regional and neighbourhood contexts on young people's aspirations and access to vocational education and training in Germany
Final Report Abstract
The central aim of the project was to investigate the role of contexts in the transitions of young people from school to vocational education and training (VET) with NEPS data. The notion of “context” poses challenges that are both substantial and methodological. On the substantial side, one has to investigate which contexts are important in what respects—e. g., is it schools, neighbourhoods, cities, regions, or several of these that impact on a certain aspect of social life? And how exactly do contexts exert their influence, i. e., which are the mechanisms that underlie a relationship observed in a given data set? On the methodological side, contexts are special not only inasmuch as individual observations may be clustered within contexts, thus giving rise to correlations within clusters, but also inasmuch as contexts typically are not independent of each other but rather appear as interconnected. Hence, spatial models for data analysis may be called for. A further (related) question concerns the delineation of contexts, as administratively defined units (neighbourhoods, districts etc.) need not (and typically will not) coincide with the social relations social scientists are actually interested in. By way of example, we could demonstrate that observed commuting flows of apprentices do not entirely correspond to pure geographical distances. Rather, infrastructure appears to be of substantial importance for the understanding of spatial dependencies—in our case, infrastructure in the form of the density of training positions that are unequally distributed across the landscape, a finding confirmed by comparing the degree of spatial autocorrelation on the basis of different connectivity matrices. The “transition” part of the project likewise is complex, as the processes underlying transitions can be described both in terms of self-selection (of young people into specific occupations or jobs) and selection (of firms or schools offering training places / jobs). We primarly emphasized the side of self-selection and particularly the influence of young people’s aspirations, and therefore devoted substantial effort to analyzing their formation. We were able demonstrate that the school context has a considerably greater influence on young people’s aspirations than the neighbourhoods where they live. This probably reflects the selection of young people into different school types that is characteristic of Germany, a country with a highly stratified school system. However, schools not only shape youths’ realistic occupational aspirations, i. e., their career expectations, they are also important places of secondary socialization in that they have an impact on young people’s idealistic aspirations, i. e., their preferences for particular occupations. In a further step, we looked particularly on young immigrants’ aspirations by looking at their social embeddedness in the host society in terms of their institutionally predefined ties to school peers. In particular, we investigated the relationship between the aspirations of immigrant and native youths with special regard to the social mechanisms that may underlie peer influences. The results showed that a high ratio of immigrants in schools positively influences the aspirations of both immigrant and native German youths by way of school climate. Yet, the effects may differ by group of origin. In particular, the aspiration gap between Turks and native Germans decreases with increasing segregation, an effect that may be attributable to less perceived discriminatory experiences in school. At the same time, Turkish young people’s stronger adaptation to the climate in ethnically segregated schools reinforces the protective effect of ethnic segregation and, additionally, lowers the aspirations of these youths.
Publications
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2014. The Impact of Neighborhoods and Schools on Young People’s Occupational Aspirations. Journal of Vocational Behavior 85(3), 298–308
Wicht, A. & W. Ludwig-Mayerhofer
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2015. Möglichkeiten der Nutzung regionaler Daten im Nationalen Bildungspanel – ein Überblick. NEPS Working Paper 54. Bamberg: Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsverläufe, Nationales Bildungspanel
Weßling, K. & A. Wicht
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2015. Von Orten zu Räumen: Regionale Kontexte in der Bildungssoziologie. In Stadtbaustein Bildung, edited by Th. Coelen, A. J. Heinrich, A. Million. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 319–329
Wicht, A.
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2016. Occupational Aspirations and Ethnic School Segregation: Social Contagion Effects Among Native German and Immigrant Youths. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Wicht, A.
