Mapping inequalities in school attendance:The relationship between dimensions of socioeconomic status and forms of school absence

In this article, we investigated whether and to what extent various dimensions of socioeconomic background (parental education, parental class, free school meal registration, housing status, and neighborhood deprivation) predict overall school absences and different reasons for absenteeism (truancy, sickness, family holidays and temporary exclusion) among 4,620 secondary school pupils in Scotland. Students were drawn from a sample of the Scottish Longitudinal Study comprising linked Census data and administrative school records. Using fractional logit models and logistic regressions, we found that all dimensions of socioeconomic background were uniquely linked to overall absences. Multiple measures of socioeconomic background were also associated with truancy, sickness-related absence, and temporary exclusion. Social housing and parental education had the most pervasive associations with school absences across all forms of absenteeism. Our findings highlight the need to consider the multidimensionality of socioeconomic background in policy and research decisions on school absenteeism. A more explicit focus on narrowing the socioeconomic gap in absenteeism is required to close the inequality gap in educational and post-school outcomes

What about dads? — A latent and growth mixture modeling study of fathers\u27 anger, anxiety, and depression

Little work has been conducted on the impact of fathers’ social-emotional functioning over time on children’s socioemotional and cognitive functioning. The bulk of research on children’s social-emotional outcomes has concentrated on mothers and has largely neglected fathers. As fathers become more involved with child care, it becomes increasingly important to understand the influence of their mental health on children. Growth mixture modeling analyses in the current study failed to uncover unobserved developmental subpopulations of fathers’ changing depressive, anger, and anxiety symptoms during their children’s primary school years. Regression analyses revealed that the association between parents’ psychology and child behavior varied based on the informant of child behavior. Ancillary analyses attempted to explain the informant inconsistencies by including all of the informants’ reports in a single model and testing a causal relationship between parent symptoms and the error terms associated with parent ratings. Structural equation models indicated a modest effect of both fathers’ and mothers’ depression, anger, and anxiety symptoms on distortion of the error terms associated with children’s problem behavior ratings. These results suggest that parental psychopathology symptoms lead to a perceptual bias in child ratings and cause modest overreporting of problem behaviors