Scholing of sociale herkomst? De invloed van opleidingsniveau op religieuze, politieke en sociale oriëntaties na controle voor gezinsachtergrond

Samenvatting

Schooling or social origin? The impact of educational attainment on religious, political, and social orientations after controlling for family background. Summary: The impact of educational attainment on religious, political, and social orientations is often explained as an effect of schooling. However, educational attainment also represents social origin. In order to obtain the real effect of schooling on attitudes and behaviour, one needs to control for family background as completely as possible. Sibling-models are particulary appropriate for this purpose, because they control for the total impact of family background. In this study, I employ data on respondents and one of their siblings ftom the Netherlands Family Survey 1992-93 and the Family Survey Dutch Population 1998. The results show that the influence of education on orthodox religious belief, church attendance, political party preference, left-right placement, conventional and unconventional political participation, postmaterialism, economic and cultural conservatism, and traditional male-female attitudes is overestimated by a factor of 1.95 on average when not controlling for the total family impact.