Abstract
Are educational outcomes subject to a 'grandparent effect'? We comprehensively and critically review the growing literature on this question. Fifty-eight percent of 69 analyses report that grandparents' (G1) socioeconomic characteristics are associated with children’s (G3) educational outcomes, independently of the characteristics of parents (G2). This is not clearly patterned by study characteristics, except sample size. The median ratio of G2:G1 strength of association with outcomes is 4.1, implying that grandparents matter around a quarter as much as parents for education. On average, 30 percent of the bivariate G1–G3 association remains once G2 information is included. Grandparents appear to be especially important where G2 socioeconomic resources are low, supporting the compensation hypothesis. We further discuss whether particular grandparents matter, the role of assortative mating, and the hypothesis that G1–G3 associations should be stronger where there is (more) G1–G3 contact, for which repeated null findings are reported. We recommend that measures of social origin include information on grandparents.
Highlights
A long and fruitful tradition in sociology has examined the intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic characteristics
How much of the G1– G3 association persists after controls for G2 are introduced? Fourth, what evidence has been reported that sheds light on the mechanisms through which a grandparent effect might act? Fifth, what is the role of assortative mating in accounting for G1– G3 associations? Sixth, we examine evidence on the distribution of the grandparent effect, as there are reasons to expect heterogeneity in its operation
The extant evidence gives a remarkably incoherent picture as to whether grandparental resources are associated with the educational outcomes of their grandchildren independently of the characteristics of the parental generation: 58 percent of the 69 analyses that model this relationship report a significant association
Summary
A long and fruitful tradition in sociology has examined the intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic characteristics. A wide variety of analytical approaches and data sets have been deployed in this enterprise, but the great majority of studies have in common a two-generation approach: for the purposes of determining the influence of family background on an individual’s life chances, the former is effectively equated with the characteristics of that individual’s parents. This approach makes an implicit assumption about the intergenerational transmission of advantage over successive generations, namely that this long-run process can be adequately described as a series of independent associations between adjacent generations. Correlations and similar parameters estimating the persistence of educational outcomes over three generations are reported in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 (online supplement) and tend to range between 0.1 and 0.3
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