Abstract
BackgroundCognitive ability and socioeconomic background (SEB) have been previously identified as determinants of achieved level of education. According to a “discrimination hypothesis”, higher cognitive ability is required from those with lower SEB in order to achieve the same level of education as those with higher SEB. Support for this hypothesis has been claimed from the observation of a positive association between SEB and achieved level of education when adjusting for cognitive ability. We propose a competing hypothesis that the observed association is due to residual confounding.MethodsTo adjudicate between the discrimination and the residual confounding hypotheses, data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97, N = 8984) was utilized, including a check of the logic where we switched predictor and outcome variables.ResultsThe expected positive association between SEB and achieved level of education when adjusting for cognitive ability (predicted by both hypotheses) was found, but a positive association between cognitive ability and SEB when adjusting for level of education (predicted only by the residual confounding hypothesis) was also observed.ConclusionsThese results highlight the potential use of reversing predictors and outcomes to test the logic of hypothesis testing, and support a residual confounding hypothesis over a discrimination hypothesis in explaining associations between SEB, cognitive ability, and educational outcome.
Highlights
Studies have found an association between individuals’ socioeconomic background (SEB) and achieved level of education or socioeconomic position even when adjusting for cognitive ability [e.g. 1, 2]
We see that the association between SEB and academic degree when adjusting for cognitive ability was weaker than the association between SEB and cognitive ability when adjusting for academic degree
This study aimed to investigate whether the discrimination hypothesis or the residual confounding hypothesis was best supported by empirical data, and whether, in the present case, reversing the predictors and outcomes yielded a viable test of the logic of inference
Summary
Academic degree and cognitive ability were more strongly associated with each other, adjusted or not, than with SEB. The difference between the respondents’ academic degree and cognitive ability was weakly negatively associated with SEB (β = − 0.051, 95% CI − 0.081; − 0.021, p < 0.001, Fig. 2), indicating that those with high SEB did not tend to have a higher standardized score on education than on cognitive ability
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