How does community influence cultural capital reproduction: Observations from the China Family Panel Study. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development Conference, Salt Lake City, USA, March 23 - 25, 2023

Abstract

<p>Development and achievement gaps begin early and persist through the school years. Abundant research has documented gradient relations between early development outcomes and both family-level socioeconomic status (SES) and early learning environments (Minh et al., 2017). Recent research has further connected child achievement with the broader neighbourhood and community contexts (McCoy et al., 2022). Against this background, the current study investigates how inequalities in community contexts affect family cultural capital and, in turn, the investment in early learning.<br>Parental values, expectations, and investments represent important forms of cultural capital in addition to parental education (Bourdieu, 1998). These embodied beliefs and investments in early learning contribute to variations in children's school achievement. Families are nested within communities, and community contexts, therefore, influence the reproduction of these forms of cultural capital. However, our understanding of the community context and its influences on families is not yet comprehensive, as scant attention has been paid to understanding the roots of inequalities in community characteristics. There is also a dearth of research examining the processes through which inequalities in community contexts alleviate or exacerbate disparities in parents' beliefs and investments related to education in high-income countries (Spera et al., 2009). Even less research has been conducted in low- and middle-income countries wherein urbanization has rapidly changed traditional community contexts.<br>We leverage four waves of multi-informant data from the China Family Panel Study (CFPS) to address these research gaps. The CFPS is a nationally representative, longitudinal social survey conducted biannually to collect individual, family, and community data. The sample focused on 4,676 families with children from birth to 6 years from 1,318 communities across 25 provinces in China. In 2010 and 2014, interviewers and community administrators provided information on the local community environment, population structure, and economic characteristics. Parents reported on their values and beliefs about child education (i.e., educational aspirations, values of cultural capital reproduction, and achievement attributes). In 2012 and 2016, parents reported their monetary investment in education (i.e., current expenditure on child education and savings for child future education) and frequencies of different home learning activities (e.g., reading to the child).<br>The results, after accounting for the family- and child-level covariates, showed that: (i) community environment, population structure, and economic characteristics significantly predicted education-related beliefs and monetary investment in education; and (ii) parental beliefs about education mediated the relations between community characteristics and investment in early learning. Specifically, communities with better settings and observed environments were associated with higher educational aspirations, stronger beliefs that education determines child achievements, and more monetary investments in education. In contrast, remote and poor communities were associated with stronger beliefs that social class determines child achievements, lower educational aspirations, and reduced monetary investment in education. A lower educational aspiration further predicted fewer home learning activities, less current expenditure on child education, and a lower probability of saving for child future education.<br>In conclusion, this study demonstrates that inequalities in community contexts significantly affect parents' education-related beliefs, monetary investment, and early learning environments beyond the influences of family SES.<br></p>