The Effect of Inequalities within Families on Work-Values of Adolescents

The occupational aspirations and work-values of adolescents strongly influence their career choice and therefore are formative for their status attainment. The importance of the family for adolescents’ development of work-values has been mostly studied in terms of direct intergenerational transmission of work-values from parents to their children. In contrast with this approach the paper investigates to what extent the sibling constellations and inequalities within the family affect the formation of work-values. It is assumed that differences in supportive parenting between siblings reduce the social work-values of the child that is less supported. Based on the assumptions of the theories and research on social comparisons it is further assumed that these effects are stronger for more similar sibling pairs, because the individual social comparison orientation is stronger and a “de-identification" is harder within these pairs.

The analysis is based on household panel data from the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the years 2000-2011. In the GSOEP adolescents are interviewed at the age of 17, including questions on their vocational goals or their perceived parenting behavior. The great advantage of the data is that the siblings are also surveyed at the age of 17.

On the basis of “Sibling-Fixed-Effects-Models” I estimate the effect of the differences in the perceived parenting behavior. First results show that a supportive parenting style increases the social work values, but that higher support of the other sibling leads to a lower formation of social work-values. The results also reveal a stronger effect for same-sex siblings in comparison to opposite-sex siblings. In particular, the effect is stronger for sisters than for brothers.