Introduction
considered in this report under the heading ‘proximal process’, in particular as home
learning.
Another element of cultural capital is ease and familiarity with the typically middle
class environment of schools. This matching of child and family to school is
considered in this report in section 4 on characteristics of context.
1.5.9 Integration of economic and psychological approaches
Another advantage of the approach adopted is that it enables us to integrate studies
from a number of disciplines, in particular studies of distal factors from economics
alongside studies of proximal processes from psychology. These studies tend to have
quite different theoretical and methodological foundations but as we discuss in section
5 on distal factors the developmental model can nest both approaches.
The application of the economic model to children’s attainment derives from Becker
(Becker, 1973) and a tradition which considers how children’s educational
attainments can be modelled on the basis of an analogy between the family and the
firm. In this model, the family can be figured as a production unit, producing the basic
goods of family well-being such as health, consumption goods and the successful
development of children on the basis of the allocation of the time of the productive
members of the family in the relevant production processes.
Inputs are allocated in such a way as to produce that set of outputs that maximises the
utility of the decision-making family members subject to the constraints of the family
which are constraints of time, wealth and of their ability to produce the desired
outputs.
In this sense parents can choose to influence children’s attainment by spending
resources of time and money on those activities that produce attainment. The limit to
this investment is the limit of time and money available and the ability of the
attainment production process to produce attainment. The strength of the model is that
it makes explicit the substitutions involved in parental decision-making. Money spent
on school-books for children cannot simultaneously be spent on restaurants for the
parents. Time spent in the labour market earning income to buy consumer goods
cannot be spent on leisure and so on. The decisions about the relative allocation of
time and resources depend on the valuation parents make about the different outputs
obtainable to them. These are referred to as preferences and expressed mathematically
in economic modelling as utility functions.
In the Becker model there are two main channels through which parental education
may impact on children’s attainment:
i. it may improve the effectiveness of household production and so increase the
academic attainment of children through the attainment production function;
ii. it may also change the utility function, increasing the weight given to the
educational attainment of children and so increasing investments in children,
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