Social Stratification and Mobility in a South Italian Town

Abstract

from classes IV-V. Also, we have noted time and again that boys from small families tend to have higher achievement motivation than their peers from large families. But the effects of social class and family size, as well as the impact of birth order and mother's age, can only be properly understood in a large context in which all of these variables (and others, undoubtedly) interact. For example, the impact of family size on the boy's achievement motivation varies with his social class. It was shown that while, in general, motivation scores decline as family size increases, the effect of family size on motivation scores is much greater at the upper-middle (class I-II) and lower class (class V) levels than at the lower-middle (class III) and upper-lower class (class IV) levels. Furthermore the effect of birth order is intimately related to family size and social class. Hence it is not very helpful in predicting an individual's achievement motivation to know his position in the birth order-indeed this information may be misleading rather than useful-unless the social class and size of his family of orientation are also known. In small middle class families, for example, the effect of ordinal position seems to be relatively unimportant: the oldest and youngest child in a two-child, middle class family have almost identical motivation scores, but as the size of the family increases the scores for the oldest child in the middle class become higher than those for the youngest child. However, in the lower class the reverse is true: the youngest child has a higher achievement motivation score on the average than the oldest child-a position that is maintained even when the size of the family increases. Similarly, the effect of mother's age upon the child's achievement motivation varies with the size of her family and social class. Thus the hypothesis that the sons of young mothers would have higher achievement motivation than the sons of old mothers proved to be correct, but only when the family is small. As the size of the family increases, particularly in the lower class, the scores of sons of young mothers drop rapidly and are surpassed by the scores of sons of middle age and old mothers. These data, then, indicate that the demographic factors examined in this study have relevance for the development of achievement motivation, but their effects are complicated, interconnected, and interdependent upon one another, and difficult to assess individually.