Supportive Parenting

For measuring the socialisation that children experience, a construct measured in the Youth Questionnaire is used. ‘Supportive parenting’ consists of nine items asked to the children about the perceived support of the parents. It measures how much attention, love and constructive communication exists between the parents to the children. A supportive parenting style has been found to lead to a healthy social and cognitive development of the child (Gerlitz and Schupp, 2005; Simons et al., 1992; Rutter, 1985). The items

Table 3.6: Items of Supportive Parenting Item Itemtext

How often does it happen that. . .

1 your parents talk to you about thing that you do or that you have experienced? 2 your parents address things that upset or burden you?

3 your parents ask for your opinion before they decide on something that concerns you?

4 your parents show that they are happy when you do something that your parents like?

5 you can find a solution together when you and your parents have a problem with each other?

6 your parents give you the feeling that they really trust you?

7 your parents ask for your opinion before they decide about family matters? 8 your parents explain their decisions to you?

9 your parents show you that they really love you?

Source: After Weinhardt and Schupp (2011, p. 17)

were originally coded 1–‘very often’, 2–‘often’, 3–‘sometimes’, 4–‘rarely’, 5–‘never’. For the analysis all items were inversely and linearly transformed from 1–‘low supportive parenting’ to 10–‘high supportive parenting’ (table 3.6).

Controls

Control variables are used depending on the necessity for the model. Age in years is used and from this, age squared, to model a nonlinear effect. Age is related to the level of qualification. Older cohorts tend to have lower levels of education, as mentioned above. Furthermore, age is related to income. Most persons have an increase of income over the life course. Even though research results are not consistent across studies (see section 4.1) it cannot be excluded that there is a systematic pattern of personality by age, also in an interplay with other variables. Of course, this only applies to the adult sample, as the youth sample consists only of 17-year-olds. They cover, however, almost a whole generation born from 1983 to 1994, the year of birth is considered for the same reasons.

Gender is coded 0 for men and 1 for women. There are countless studies about differ- ences in education and income (Blau and Kahn, 2016, 1997; Budig and England, 2001; Schuhrer et al., 2015; Selezneva and Van Kerm, 2016; Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebmer,

2003, e.g. ) across genders. Also for personality systematic differences between genders with regard to labour market returns have been found (Mueller and Plug, 2006). This underlines the necessity to add gender as a control variable. Family status is coded 0 for not married and 1 for married. Also self-selection into marriage is connected to personal- ity (Dupuy and Galichon, 2014), as it is for education (Blossfeld, 2009; Hamplova, 2009) and income (Blossfeld and Drobnic, 2001; Kalmijn, 1991). To avoid systematic biases in the models, marriage status was added to the models.

Some models were estimated including the Erikson-Goldthorpe Class Scheme (EGP) and the monthly household net income in addition to the parental education, as mentioned above. The EGP was simplified by collapsing inactive persons with unskilled with farm workers, all types of self-employment, and routine manual with service-sales workers each into a new category.

Descriptives for all variables, distribution of personality over school and income groups, as well as the gender distribution of selected variables and correlation tables can be found in the Appendix table A to figure B.

4 The Effect of Personality on

Education and Labour Market

Outcomes

This chapter is dedicated to the first research question, to what extent personality affects education an labour market outcomes. First, it provides an overview of the history of personality research. This comprises a section on stability of personality over the life course, discussing the state of the art in this area of research with a literature review. The overview is helpful to understand how personality could affect education and labour market outcomes in different ways, because they take place at different stages of the life course. This leads to the second section, where the focus lies on the demands in education and labour market on personality of children, adolescents and adults. In this context, the German school system is explained, because the data for the analysis is data for Germany. Finally, the last theoretical section is a literature review on previous research on personality and education and labour market outcomes at different stages of the life course.

The empirical part of this chapter first examines the direct effects of different person- ality traits on school outcomes, more precisely on school placement (lower, intermediate and upper secondary schools) and performance (maths grades). Next to bivariate analy- ses, testing differences in personality across school types, Structural Equation Modelling is applied to analyse the effects of personality on school outcomes taking into considera- tion that personality traits are latent variables. The second empirical part is dedicated to

the effects of personality on income, as a labour market outcome, and vice versa. Here, a research gap is addressed as to what extent there is a reciprocal effect of income and personality traits. Examining reversed causality between education personality is of sec- ondary interest for two reasons: Firstly, for adults, education is in the vast majority of cases a time-invariant variable, i.e. once the highest degree of education is reached, people rarely attain more formal education, in the sense of state certified degrees. In terms of panel data analysis, a time-invariant variable cannot affect a time-variant variable, in this case personality, unless there is an interaction effect of that time-invariant variable with a time-variant variable such as time itself. However, so far this has not been a research interest due to a lack of possible mechanisms for this relationship. Income on the other hand, does change over time and, as discussed later on, is expected to influence per- sonality. Secondly, the question of whether education influences school outcomes would be interesting if there was longitudinal data on personality for children and their school outcomes before they finish education, but so far there has been none.