Project A5

This project studies the determinants and effects of educational poverty from an international comparative perspective. It views educational poverty as a central concept in the contemporary welfare-state debate around intersections between social policy and education policy. Specifically, it addresses the following questions:

• How can educational poverty be defined, measured, and described? Although different approaches are available, they have seldom been applied to conduct comparative analyses from an international perspective. As part of the project, these approaches will be examined and compared.
• How can the emergence of educational poverty be explained? Here, educational poverty is viewed as one specific aspect of educational inequality. The study investigates how the relationship between the heterogeneity of individual characteristics and patterns of unequal access to education vary across different institutional contexts.
• What are the effects of educational poverty? The project studies the degree to which the educationally disadvantaged are affected by unemployment, poor positions on the labor market, and low pay. It also asks whether national differences in the frequency of these effects can be attributed to differences in institutional framing conditions.

The project combines a broad-based comparison between nations with a more detailed, longitudinal, nation-based analysis. The institutional framing conditions are mapped by means of a specially developed macro database. Together with micro data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), this will serve as the basis for multilevel empirical analyses of the determinants and effects of educational poverty. For Germany, more detailed longitudinal analyses will be carried out using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP).