Life expectancy and socio-economic status

A useful Irish Times article documents CSO data on how life expectancy varies with socio-economic status and other variables: "Life expectancy is longest among those with the highest social class and the highest level of education. Male professional workers have a life expectancy of 81.4 years, for example, 6.1 years higher than their unskilled counterparts...For women, professional workers have the highest life expectancy, at 86 years, while unskilled workers have the lowest, 81 years."

Fair admissions to university?

The evidence base for fair admissions: can we achieve excellence and social justice?

The University of Manchester
7 - 8 July 2011

A unique conference bringing together theorists, researchers and policy-makers in higher education, working on fair admissions to competitive higher education institutions.

The full programme for the conference will be available from February 2011.

Social class and educational attainment of Irish children

It is well known that children from high SES backgrounds do much better in school and this explains, at least proximately, the very sharp SES gradient with regard to university entrance. Or, to put it in English, working class kids get, on average, much worse Leaving Certs and this is why they are much less likely to get to uni' and certainly less likely to get into the more remunerative professional programs. The recent hullaboloo about "Free fees" , on the occasion of my paper on the subject, more or less ignored this inconvenient truth.
But when in the lifecycle does disadvantage set in? Clearly it doesn't just happen at 18. The Growing up in Ireland data allows us to take a snapshot of this gradient when children in Ireland are about 9 years of age.

This graphs the mean maths score by household social class and one can clearly see a pronounced association. Social class is based on the highest class of the two parents - if there are two around. Even at age 8 or 9 coming from a professional/managerial household makes a big difference. Alternatively one could look at the education of the primary carer (usually the mother):

Its still the same old story: if your parents have low education then you are at a considerable disadvantage. Doing some simple multivariate modelling, both factors have an independent effect, as does income and other variables. Girls do worse for example though as is well known the reverse seems to be the case when it comes to doing the Leaving Cert.
To get an idea of the magnitudes involved, the mean and standard deviation of the maths test (which is the Drumcondra test) are respectively-0.64 & 0.92 respectively. When one does the regressions one finds that a child of a graduate mother can expect a score that is about .5 higher than a child of a mother with only minimum education (so about 55% of a std dev). For social class the gradient is flatter: the average difference between the top and bottom social classes is about .26. By comparison, the "penalty" to being a girl is 0.1.
Whether the childrens subsequent education exacerbates or reduces this pattern we cannot say. But Jim Heckman, for example, has argued strongly in favour of dynamic complementarities i.e. that learning begets learning which implies that, if anything, early inequalities get worse over time.
So one lesson from all this is I think, that early intervention is necessary if we are serious about addressing socio-economic inequalities in education. Alls we need to do is get serious about it.

Socio-economic predictors of breastfeeding in Ireland

When a child is born the first investment decision a parent makes is whether to breastfed the child. This usually occurs within the first hour. Of course decisions taken beforehand, like diet, also have an important role. Since breastfeeding is generally considered to have important physical and other benefits for both child and mother, understanding who is more likely to breastfeed (& ultimately why) is important. This is particularly the case in Ireland where breastfeeding has a relatively low incidence.
It might be conjectured that social class has some role to play. High SES mothers may have access to better information (or be better able to process the information) as well as support networks. They have less of a need to return to work. On the other hand, the opportunity cost of their time may be higher.
The graph below shows the proportion of children breastfed by socio-economic class (where there are two adults in the household, it is the highest of the two classes).

There is a very striking gradient with children from manual backgrounds being much less likely to be breastfed.
Of course, one can't be sure what the reason for this link is. Class is correlated with education, income and other factors. Looking at the gradient with respect to the primary carer's education one finds:

Again there is a strong pattern with children of more educated mothers being much likely to be breastfed. What happens if we put both factors together in a model? Well both play an independent role although education seems to be the dominant factor. Interesting, household income does not have a significant role to play given social class & maternal education.
One can find other predictive factors: younger mothers and those from rural areas are less likely to breastfed. But these factors seem to have a fairly small role compared to social class and education.
If we look at mother's behaviour during pregnancy for clues as to whether they breastfed one comes across an interesting anomaly. Those who smoked during pregnancy are about 9% less likely to breastfeed, other things being equal, whereas those who consumed alcohol are about 3% more likely.