Individual and Institutional Factors in the Choice of the Educational Track after Completing Compulsory Secondary Education in the City of Barcelona: An Approach through Multilevel Analysis

Educational inequalities has been a central theme in Sociology of Education, within the context of industrialised countries and especially with the important expansion developed in the last decades of the educational system. It is not only it is focused on the influence of social origin on the academic results obtained (primary effects), but also it is analysed the choice of educational track, which has become popular as the secondary effects (Boudon, and Breen & Goldthorpe, 1997, Mayer, Müller & Pollak, 2007, Breen et al., 2009 and Jackson, 2013). Focusing on the latter, the factors involved in the decision to make at each intersection of education are key to understanding the inequalities in the educational tracks of young people, adopting either an academic option or more professional or dropping out the system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the individual characteristics along with the family characteristics and institutional factors associated with the school center in the decision of the educational track after completing compulsory secondary education. For this, the multilevel analysis is used, under the approach of a model with two levels of variables, level 1 corresponding to the students who finished compulsory secondary school, and level 2 corresponding to the schools where they studied. Variables included in the model belong to several areas: personal characteristics; family characteristics (related to socio-cultural and economic background); and school characteristics (related to its users and the educational processes taking place in it). The sample, which come from an international longitudinal study of 10^th Grade students in thirteen cities of the world (Cities Project)[1], consists of a total of 2056 students who were enrolled in secondary school in the academic year 2013-14 - or who were born in 1998 - from 27 centers of the city of Barcelona.

[1] http://iscy.org/