Chapter 10: Skills, parental education and literacy practice in daily life

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Overview and highlights

This chapter examines the relationship between the skills measured in ALL and family socio-economic background as well as literacy related practices in daily life. The analysis explores the extent to which observed differences in skills can be attributed to socio-economic inequalities. This is done for three cohorts of adults, namely youth aged 16 to 25, early middle aged adults 26 to 45 and late middle aged adults 46 to 65. The three age groups differ in the relationship between skills and socio-economic background. For example, the strength of the link between family background and skills among youth has changed in some countries over time between the IALS and ALL survey periods. The analysis further shows interesting variation in the impact of engaging in literacy practices at home and at work on inequality in skill.

The main results of the analysis undertaken in this chapter are:

Family socio-economic background as measured by respondent’s parents’ level of education has a significant relationship with literacy scores in all countries. On average, adults whose parents have a high level of education score higher than adults whose parents have a low level of education. Moreover, the strength of this relationship varies substantially by country.

A comparison of socio-economic gradients reveals that Norway has the least inequality in among youth from differing socio-economic backgrounds. In contrast, the United States exhibits the largest gap in skill levels by socio-economic background.

Results suggest that the literacy scores of youth in Canada are on average lower in the ALL survey than in IALS. Moreover, the decline is predominantly among youth who are from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as gauged by parental education. In Norway and the United States , there is little change among the performance of youth between the two survey periods.

After adjusting for parents’ education, youth are on average performing lower than adults aged 26 to 45. Patterns of lower average youth performances in relation to parents’ level of education are mixed. In Bermuda, Canada and the United States, youth performance is lower at nearly all levels of parental education. In Italy and Norway, it is lower for average to high levels of parental education, while performance among those whose parents’ have low levels of education has improved compared to adults aged 26 to 45.

The level of engagement in literacy activities at home has a significant impact on literacy scores. The magnitude of the association is similar across all age groups and is in the order of 16 to 20 points on the prose scale for the half of adults who engage in literacy activities the most. The relationship is similar for all age groups. There is an additional positive effect for engaging more in literacy practices at work of about 1 to 14 points, but the effect grows stronger with increasing age.