Contextual effects on student efficiency at secondary school students

Abstract

The purpose of the study is double: on the one part, the presentation and popularization of a scarcely used method in domestic sociology, the contextual analysis, on the other, the presentation of the effects of the cultural and social capital on high-school students’ efficiency within an OTKA 2006–2008 research project. The regression models called attention to the importance of the contextual (institution-wide) effects on high-school students’ efficiency and performance. This study presents these effects by using Davis’s typology and separates the effects on individual and group levels. Among the factors that explain school success are sex, cultural capital brought from home and the students’ and their parents’ relationship resources (in the case of the last one we accentuate those relationships which are determined by the students’ and their parents’ religiousness). We came to the results that while boys’ school (class) percentage does not have any contextual effect, the percentage of parents with degree per school/class already has an effect on the students’ school efficiency, and concerning social capital we also have interesting results.