Effect of Paternal and Maternal Grandparents' Education on Children's Educational Attainment : The Case of Japan

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  • 父方と母方の祖父母の学歴が子どもの教育達成に及ぼす影響 : 日本の事例

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This study scrutinizes the differential effects of paternal and maternal grandparents' education on children's educational attainment using a novel method that combines structural equation modeling and multiple imputation of a representative dataset in Japan. Most of the previous three-generation mobility studies did not consider both lineages. Although a few studies analyzed four grandparents simultaneously, they covered only Western societies, and the results were mixed. Thus, it is worth examining East Asian societies such as Japan, which has a cultural difference in family systems from Western counterparts. Methodologically, we employed SEM with multiple imputation to overcome serious estimation biases in previous studies, which used OLS regressions to ignore missing information on grandparents' education. A representative Japanese dataset in 2006 with an analytical sample of 1,966 children showed that maternal grandparents' education directly affects children's educational attainment. This was robust even when education was measured by credentials instead of years of schooling or using another dataset. This paper makes a major contribution by highlighting the salience of maternal genealogy in multigenerational mobility by the simultaneous estimation of paternal and maternal grandparents. The difference between the findings of this study, which used Japanese data, and those of the previous studies, which were located in Western societies, might be attributed to cultural differences in family systems. The methodological contribution of this study is that while the previous studies omitted missing values, possibly leading to biased results, we introduced SEM with multiple imputation to realize less-biased estimation in the three-generation mobility studies.

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