Parental investment in schooling: Evidence from a subsistence farming community in South Africa
Parental investment in schooling: Evidence from a subsistence farming community in South Africa
复制标题
家长对学校教育的投资：来自南非自给农业社区的证据
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
P. Henzi
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
C. Liddell;L. Barrett;P. Henzi
访谈进行了一个队列的488名父母谁住在南非的偏远地区，资源非常贫乏的自给农民。大多数答复者在子女教育方面投入了大量资金，这与从大家庭人口以及家庭面临的经济和生态压力中可能作出的预测相反。几乎没有证据表明儿童专业化，即教育投资可能更多地针对家庭中的某些儿童而不是其他儿童。然而，相对较宽的生育间隔可能使上学的财政和机会成本更易于管理。这一推测得到了两个研究结果的支持：第一，随着生育间隔的增加，儿童在离校前完成的年级数量显著增加;第二，随着生育间隔的增加，仍在上学的儿童进步更快。儿子上学的机会更多（由于社区中移徙劳工的比例较低），加上女儿上学的机会成本较高，使得儿子受教育的程度可能高于女儿。然而，有一致的证据表明，在学校教育模式方面存在性别平等。这是因为在这一特定社区抚养女儿的经济和机会损失风险较低。出生顺序对父母教育子女的决定影响不大。在父母无法控制的情况下，投资战略总体上可以被解释为“对冲风险”，因为父母无法控制的情况使他们无法将投资目标对准那些可以很容易地被确定为具有良好教育和就业前景的儿童。它的结论是，父母投资于他们的儿子和女儿的方式，只能被理解时，考虑到其特定的社会，经济和生态环境的复杂性。
Interviews were carried out amongst a cohort of 488 parents who lived as subsistence farmers in a remote and very poorly resourced region of South Africa. The majority of respondents had invested heavily in the education of their children, contrary to what might have been predicted from large family sizes and the economic and ecological pressures that families faced. There was little evidence of child specialization, in which educational investment might have been targeted more to some children than others in a family. However, relatively wide birth spacing may have made the financial and opportunity costs of schooling more manageable. This speculation is given some support by two findings: first, that the number of grades of schooling children complete before leaving increases significantly as birth spacing increases; second, that children who are still in school progress more rapidly as birth interval increases. Greater opportunities for the schooling of sons (made possible by low rates of migrant labour in the community), coupled with high opportunity costs associated with the schooling of daughters, made it likely that sons would be educated to a higher level than daughters. However, there was consistent evidence for gender equity in schooling patterns. This is attributed to the lower risk of financial and opportunity losses that are associated with rearing daughters in this particular community. Birth order exerted only modest effects on the decisions parents made about schooling their offspring. The investment strategy as a whole could be interpreted as ``bet-hedging' under conditions where events outside parental control prevented them from targeting investment to children who could be readily identified as having favourable educational and employment prospects. It is concluded that parents invest in their sons and daughters in a manner that can only be understood when the complexities of their particular social, economic, and ecological contexts are taken into account.