Sibling Similarity in Education Across and Within Societies

The extent to which siblings resemble each other measures the omnibus impact of family background on life chances. We study sibling similarity in cognitive skills, school grades, and educational attainment in Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compare sibling similarity by parental education and occupation within these societies. The comparison of sibling correlations across and within societies allows us to characterize the omnibus impact of family background on education across social landscapes. Across countries, we find larger population-level differences in sibling similarity in educational attainment than in cognitive skills and school grades. In general, sibling similarity in education varies less across countries than sibling similarity in earnings. Compared with Scandinavian countries, the United States shows more sibling similarity in cognitive skills and educational attainment but less sibling similarity in school grades. We find that socioeconomic differences in sibling similarity vary across parental resources, countries, and measures of educational success. Sweden and the United States show greater sibling similarity in educational attainment in families with a highly educated father, and Finland and Norway show greater sibling similarity in educational attainment in families with a low-educated father. We discuss the implications of our results for theories about the impact of institutions and income inequality on educational inequality and the mechanisms that underlie such inequality.

The pattern of educational inequality - The contribution of family background on levels of education over time and across four countries

This article analyses the pattern of inequality across levels of education and its evolution over time from a cross-national comparative perspective. We employ a previously disregarded approach of sibling correlations to measure how the contribution of the total family background differs across achieved levels of education. We compare successive birth cohorts in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and the U.S. between 1990 and 2015. We further analyze the extent to which the total contribution of parental background is accounted for by observed parental education. Our results indicate a pattern in which sibling similarity is strongest in the lowest and the highest levels of education in all studied countries. Changes over time were more pronounced in the Nordics and in educational levels other than the lowest. Observed parental education played a less notable role than expected, indicating that using only parental education ignores a substantial portion of the total influence of family background.

Sibling Similarities and the Importance of Parental Socioeconomic Position in Electoral Participation

We studied the impact of an individual’s family and community background on their voting propensity in the 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections by employing a sibling design on an individual-level register-based dataset. The results showed that a quarter of the total variance in voter turnout was shared between siblings. Considering the dichotomous nature of the turnout variable, this implies that background has a strong effect which is almost comparable to sibling similarity in education. Parental socioeconomic position and voting, in turn, are equally important factors by explaining one-third of this shared part of the likelihood of voting. Mothers and fathers make roughly equal contributions. The results suggest that future studies of inter-generational effects in political participation, whenever possible, should use information from both maternal and paternal characteristics and multiple indicators of parental socioeconomic position simultaneously. We conclude by underlining that as people cannot choose their background, voting propensity is strongly influenced by factors beyond an individual’s own control, which is problematic for the functioning of inclusive democracy and equality of opportunity.

Does sibling and twin similarity in cognitive ability differ by parents’ education?

Stratification scholars predominantly investigate how differences among children from different families emerge and tend to neglect differences among children from the same family. I study sibling similarity in cognitive ability and examine whether their similarity varies by parents’ education. Although economic approaches and their extensions argue that disadvantaged parents reinforce differences while advantaged parents compensate for differences, I argue that parents may also make equal investments and thus accept differences among their children. I refer to the literature on stratified parenting that demonstrates that parents are engaged differently in child-rearing and their children’s skill formation processes. Because advantaged parents foster children’s talents more individually compared with disadvantaged parents, I propose that sibling similarity is lower in advantaged than in disadvantaged families. Previous studies based on sibling correlations provide conflicting evidence. To account for observable and unobservable differences among siblings, I extend the established sibling correlation approach and study dizygotic and monozygotic twins in addition to siblings. The analyses draw on novel data from a population register-based study of twin families. I find that young adult siblings and twins are less alike in cognitive ability in highly educated families than in less educated families. Hence, my results support the hypothesis concerning equal investments and indicate that stratified parenting has a long-lasting influence on children’s cognitive ability.

Sibling similarity and relationship quality in Finland

Siblings form the strongest horizontal family tie, which often involves life-long emotional closeness and various forms of support. Similarity is often assumed to strengthen sibling relations, but existing evidence is scarce and mixed. Using data from the Generational Transmissions in Finland surveys collected in 2012, we employ both total and sibling fixed-effect regressions and examine whether sibling similarity is associated with relationship quality in two family generations: an older generation born in 1945–1950, and the generation of their children, born in 1962–1993. We study sibling similarity in gender, age, financial condition and parenthood status and measure relationship quality by contact frequency, emotional closeness and provision of practical help. In both generations, being of the same gender was associated with all relationship measures. Age similarity was also associated with more contacts and increased emotional closeness in the younger generation, and differences in parenthood status with increased provision of practical help in the older generation. In most aspects, however, sibling similarity was not associated with relationship quality. While sibling relations tend be strong in contemporary Finland, this is only partly due to similarity effects.