Cultural Practices and Socioeconomic Attainment: The Australian Experience

(Hardback)

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Why do parents who have high levels of education tend to have children who perform better at school, stay at school longer, and end up with more desirable jobs Researchers have evidence of how distinct factors affect educational and occupational success, but significantly less understanding of the actual mechanisms involved. This work uses new Australian data to investigate those mechanisms, examining how cultural participation and parental encouragement affect adolescent and adult stratification outcomes in advanced modern society. Crook develops theoretical accounts of the possible mechanisms linking family background with socioeconomic success and tests competing hypotheses using a synthetic approach drawing on the strengths of the two distinct traditions of social stratification research.

Reviews

[C]rook presents the available theory and data in an informative way, and I recommend the book to students of educational inequality. * Inequalities *
Cutlural Practices and Socioeconomic Attainment is a valuable contribution to eduactional and sociological research. . . . This is a very fine quantitative work. Overall, in my view, Christopher Crook should be congratulated on the quality of his analyses and thanked for his work, and readers of educational research should put Cultural Practices and Socioeconomic Attainment: The Australian Experience amongst their references. * Australian Association for Research in Education *

Author Bio

Christopher J. Crook received a PhD in sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in 1996. During 1996 he was a visiting fellow at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a technical analyst with Intelligent Marketing Systems, Inc. in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.