Social Networks and the Transition from Education to Work
Final Report Abstract
The objective of the project was to contribute to a better understanding of the role of social networks on the transition from the education system to the labour market in Germany. We investigated how social contacts influence students' educational expectations, from which specific groups young people receive assistance during their VET search and how social contacts contribute to successful or unsuccessful transitions from secondary school level I to vocational training and to ethnic inequalities in this transition. Our results show that social contacts are relevant at different stages of the transition process. Concerning interpersonal influences on students’ expectations, we find substantive correlations between educational expectations of secondary school students with those of their parents and friends. Fixed-effects regressions and stochastic actor-oriented network models indicate that friends influence each other’s expectations. Overall, our findings suggest that interpersonal influences play an important role in the domain of educational expectations. At the same time, we also find that selection effects are clearly relevant either. With respect to the role of social contacts in the transition from lower secondary education to vocational education and training, we find that adolescents heavily rely on information and support from institutional and non-institutional contacts with parents playing the most important role. Our results suggest that the general motivation of social contacts to provide support at the transition to VET does not differ between natives and migrants, but that the ability of these ties to provide more specific instrumental assistance depends on their receiving country specific resources and thus on their migration history. Consequently, adolescents whose parents were born abroad are clearly disadvantaged, since they are likely to receive less specific instrumental support from their parents. The importance of parents and their social networks is also substantiated in further analyses in which we investigate the effects of parents’ native and migrant contacts on the likelihood that their children obtain a company-based apprenticeship position (dual VET) after lower secondary education. The more native contacts their parents have, the more likely it is for adolescents to start an apprenticeship in a company. Furthermore, differences in access to host country–specific social capital account for a substantial part of the gap between native and migrant adolescents in the transition to dual VET. In contrast, migrant contacts are mostly irrelevant to whether or not children obtain a dual VET position. Besides the ethnic network composition, the social composition of parents’ networks also affects their children’s transition to vocational training. Adolescents with lower secondary education have better chances of finding an apprenticeship in a company if their parents know many persons with lower-status occupations for which vocational training is sufficient. In contrast, if parents know many persons with higher-status occupations, the probability of being in dual VET decreases while the chances of being in school-based VET or in further education tend to increase. The composition of parents’ social networks shows no effects on several quality characteristics of the apprenticeships. Our findings indicate that parents’ social networks are important for a smooth school-to-work transition of their children and confirm the idea that social capital is goal and labour market segment specific.
Publications
- (2018). The influence of parents’ social capital on their children’s school-to-work transition. Social Networks 55: 74-85
Roth, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2018.05.006) - (2019). The role of religion, religiousness and religious participation in the school-to-work transition in Germany. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46: 3580-3602
Roth, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1620414) - (2020). Why do friends have similar educational expectations? Separating influence and selection effects. European Sociological Review
Kretschmer, D., & Roth, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaa042)
