Two Forms of Social Inequality in Students' Socio-Emotional Skills: Do the Levels of Big Five Personality Traits and Their Associations With Academic Achievement Depend on Parental Socioeconomic Status?

Clemens M Lechner,Beatrice Rammstedt,Naemi D Brandt,Jens Bender

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.679438

Clemens M Lechner, Beatrice Rammstedt + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.679438

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Abstract

Some researchers and policymakers advocate a stronger focus on fostering socio-emotional skills in the hope of helping students to succeed academically, especially those who are socially disadvantaged. Others have cautioned that this might increase, rather than reduce, social inequality because personality traits conducive to achievement are themselves unevenly distributed in disfavor of socially disadvantaged students. Our paper contributes to this debate. Analyzing representative, large-scale data on 9,300 ninth graders from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and using the Big Five personality traits as a measure of socio-emotional skills, we cast light on two related yet distinct aspects of social inequality in socio-emotional skills: First, do levels of personality traits conducive to achievement vary as a function of students' parental socioeconomic status (pSES)? Second, do the returns to personality traits in terms of trait–achievement relations vary as function of pSES? Results showed that differences in Big Five traits between students with different pSES were small (0.04 ≤ |r| ≤ 0.09), especially when compared with pSES-related differences in cognitive skills (fluid intelligence) and sex-related differences in personality. The returns to Conscientiousness—the personality trait most relevant to achievement—in terms of its relations to academic achievement were higher in higher- vs. lower-SES students. Trait–achievement relations did not vary as a function of pSES for the other Big Five traits. Overall, both types of inequality were limited in magnitude. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy and practice and delineate directions for further research.

Highlights

Fostering socio-emotional skills—which are often conceptualized according to the Big Five framework of personality traits (Abrahams et al, 2019)—through school-based programs and similar interventions has been welcomed as a possible conduit for improving students’ academic achievement and life outcomes more generally (e.g., Kautz et al, 2014; Sánchez Puerta et al, 2016; Chernyshenko et al, 2018; Bleidorn et al, 2019; Malanchini et al, 2019)
We focus on relations between parental socioeconomic status (pSES) as measured by the highest International Socio-Economic Index (HISEI) of occupational status (Ganzeboom et al, 1992), Big Five personality traits as a global measure of students’ socio-emotional skills, and school achievement as measured by grade point average (GPA)
Do students’ personality traits differ depending on their pSES? As shown in Table 1, we found small correlations between the Big Five and HISEI

Summary

Introduction

Fostering socio-emotional skills—which are often conceptualized according to the Big Five framework of personality traits (Abrahams et al, 2019)—through school-based programs and similar interventions has been welcomed as a possible conduit for improving students’ academic achievement and life outcomes more generally (e.g., Kautz et al, 2014; Sánchez Puerta et al, 2016; Chernyshenko et al, 2018; Bleidorn et al, 2019; Malanchini et al, 2019) Both researchers and policymakers have espoused the hope that fostering socio-emotional skills among socially disadvantaged students might be a way to reduce social inequality in academic achievement and related outcomes (Damian et al, 2015; Arias et al, 2017; Sisk et al, 2018; Grosz et al, 2021). Few studies have examined the interplay of personality, parental socioeconomic status (pSES), and academic achievement (for an overview, see Ayoub et al, 2018)

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