tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (07/19/85)
Re my argument that improving education would not change who gets good careers and who gets bad ones, because parent's background (reflected by measures of father's occupation) always seems to carry through its initial advantage or disadvantage to the children, ... In article <489@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes: >I find it interesting that no one has seen fit to examine what seems to >me to be the fundamental underlying problem with this argument. That is >the assumption that the parents' JOB is the relevant factor. It seems >to me that the parents' attitudes and culture are the more relevant >variable. Those brought up in families where the parents read books, >hold intelligent conversations, and regard school work as important can >be expected to do better than those that don't. As it happens, this is probably the first theory(s) of career success that most people come up with to fit the "data". It's also covered in part by the studies on career success. These studies (Coleman and others) tried to control for home variables so that the effects of school variables might stand out stronger. The funny results came from looking at how much variance was left in data after home(parent) variables had been controlled for, compared to how much variance was there before. The home variables "swamped" the school variables, in that they "explained" so much difference between adult careers that there was almost no difference left for schools to "explain". Having found no value in schools, Coleman and others analyzed both home and personality data which had originally been collected for control purposes more thoroughly. The result was that, except for father's occupation and the number of books in the home, nothing looked "significant", i.e. explained lots of variance. >And those families are >(I don't, of course, have any statistics; how do you measure this?) >by and large precisely those where the parents have good jobs -- because >they have these attitudes. If that's true, then the "effects" of these attitudes could not be separated from the "effect" of good jobs in an analysis of variance. So the data could tell us nothing (if they told us anything before -- a subject on which I am extremely AGNOSTIC) about attitudes as separate phenomena in their influence on career success. Measuring attitudes has been done for years by people who think they know what they are doing and have a decided interest in the power of their measurements. So anything that we mere mortals come up with as an attitude would likely have less power in most social analyses than what the attitude analysts already measure. The appearance of success bred consensus on these questions long ago. So the sad history of these studies went on to the analysis of attitudes (Yes it did). Lots of people have tried to prove that home and parental attitudes determine career success through all sorts of subtle social mechanisms. As Jencks summarizes -- his Who Gets Ahead book is one of the better undertakers of social science research of the last 20 years -- the attitude research shows absolutely nothing. And they had enough money to run the gamut of possibilities and raise standards of social research adequacy to get more money and run more gamuts and .... Every social theorist has had their two bits in predicting some set of attitudes as keys for success. Marxists say that manager parents give their children more "creative autonomy", and there's a book called "Schooling in Capitalist America" which goes in all of the critical political science courses I've seen. Conservatives say it's believing in the value of hard work and being optimistic. Bleeeech .... not one iota of millions of dollars of studies supports a single theory from any side, if it's a theory that attitudes bring success. >What is not clear is that giving a person a good job will change these >attitudes. Maybe it will, at least in some cases. But it does not look >to me like a direct attack on the cycle of poverty. The only way to break >the cycle of poverty is to change attitudes. Unfortunately, what is also not clear is whether we should care about attitudes at all outside of the obvious boundary cases of severe mania, depression, or psychosis. Hospitalized people weren't covered in these studies as far as I recall from reading. I don't mean to disparage; the results contradict almost all first impressions on what the "root" of the problem is. Today, no serious career expert knows. Everyone is desperate and grasping at straws. All that's known are the most crude basics: parent's occupation [income] matters, race matters, and sex matters. Almost no one disputes those worn nuggets anymore. (All this work has been done in the US, note ... it's government money) I hope I'm getting a point across, that the only reason for these the crudest recommendations for how to cure poverty -- give em' money -- (or how to cure racial/sexual discrimination -- give em' good jobs --) is that no one knowing the history of career and poverty research has the vaguest supported theory that anything less than giving 'em money (or monetary equivalents) would have any measurable results. The more you know, the cruder your recommendations get. This crudity of current empirical work is only matched by the inability of modern social theory to generate successful empirical theories. It almost makes a former grad student in sociology like me cry .... If you want to get up-to-date on these kinds of questions, look at issues of Social Science and Society magazine. I'm only parroting regular discussions social scientists are having these days all the time. Tony Wuersch {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw