THE CLASSIFICATION OF QUALIFICATIONS IN SOCIAL SURVEYS

(2007) - Andrew Jenkins, Ricardo Sabates

Journal: Centre for Longitudinal Studies
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Tags:: #paper #NCDS #BHPS #Attainment
Cite Key:: [@Jenkins2007]

Abstract

Many social surveys now collect detailed information about the qualifications obtained by individuals. The reason for this is that education is seen as a powerful explanatory factor affecting behaviour throughout the lifecourse. Educational attainments will have a major impact on the transitions of young people into employment and on subsequent progress in a career and on the level of earnings. Education also has strong associations with entry into partnerships, the timing and number of births, and parenting behaviour. It may also be related to other aspects of behaviour including health as an adult, civic engagement, the likelihood of committing crime and a wide range of other matters of interest to social scientists. Qualifications can provide a convenient summary of a person’s formal educational experience. Qualifications reveal which courses have been undertaken and the standards which have been attained. Since qualifications relate to the stages of education, as well as to curriculum content, they also show how much time has been spent in education.

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(28/06/2023, 19:19:05)

“Bynner and Fogelman (1993) were among the first to draw on the idea of NVQ-equivalents to summarise the NCDS qualifications data and their classification is shown in Table 2” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 9)

“National Qualifications Framework for this purpose. Following the National Qualifications Framework, Jenkins et al (2003) distinguished three broad types of qualifications – academic, vocationally-related and occupational, with five levels based on NVQ equivalents. A novel feature of the NQF is the vocationally-related category.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 9)

“The BHPS produces information on educational background and recent attainments and, in addition, numbers of subjects passed for some school qualifications such as O-levels and A-levels. In terms of educational background, the BHPS records all qualifications obtained including school, higher education and vocational qualifications” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 19)

“Double-counting educational attainments is possible as some people would have obtained qualifications reported in the first wave after September 1991 and report such qualifications both in the first and second waves of interviews.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 19)

“According to Taylor et al. (1996) it is quite possible to obtain the same level of qualifications two years running, and no attempt had been made to eliminate this problem.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 20)

“The BHPS contains two derived variables for highest educational qualifications attained, highest academic or vocational qualifications and highest academic qualifications.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 20)

“Sabates (2003) points out some shortcomings and inconsistencies of the derived variables for educational qualifications in the BHPS. The derived variable highest academic qualifications contains also vocational qualifications. Some categories for the variable highest qualifications combine vocational and academic qualifications, whereas other categories only include either academic or vocational qualifications.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 20)

“However, we find that when the focus of the study is not on the relationship between education and outcome, but rather on other predictors or on the outcome itself, little attention is placed into the classification of qualifications.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 21)

“Brynin and Francesconi (2002) classify educational background as less than O-levels, O-levels or GCSE, A-level, higher vocational degree and university or higher academic degree to address the effects of partner’s observable and unobservable human capital characteristics into her partner’s labour market outcomes. This classification of educational qualifications is more closely related to the National Qualifications Framework.” (Jenkins and Sabates, 2007, p. 21)