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Mothers’ Differential Treatment of Adolescent Siblings: Predicting College Attendance of Sisters Versus Brothers

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

Current estimates suggest that by 2015, 60% of college students will be women, a change since 1970 when 59% were men. We investigated family dynamics that might explain the growing gender gap in college attendance, focusing on an ethnically diverse sample of 522 mixed sex sibling dyads from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. We examined whether the difference between sisters’ and brothers’ reports of their mothers’ expectations for, and involvement in, their education during adolescence predicted their differential odds of college attendance seven years later. Sisters were more likely than brothers to attend college, and this gap was more pronounced among non-Whites and non-Asians. Sisters also had higher grades in school than their brothers. Although there were no gender differences overall in maternal educational expectations or involvement, brothers reported greater maternal involvement than sisters in non-White and non-Asian families. After controlling for family background factors, the average of siblings’ reports of maternal treatment, and differences between siblings’ grades, the results revealed that as sisters reported greater maternal educational expectations than their brothers, it became more likely that only the sister rather than only the brother in the family attended college. The difference between brothers’ and sisters’ reports of their mothers’ educational involvement and their odds of attending college showed the same pattern of association but was not statistically significant. These results suggest that within-family social comparisons may play a role in sisters’ and brothers’ choices about attending college.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from NICHD (HD045309), Nancy Landale, PI, and uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. We thank Mona Ostrowksi for her programming assistance during this project.

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  1. School of Psychology, Walden University, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Joanna M. Bissell-Havran

  2. Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Eric Loken & Susan M. McHale

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  1. Joanna M. Bissell-Havran
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Correspondence to Joanna M. Bissell-Havran.

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Bissell-Havran, J.M., Loken, E. & McHale, S.M. Mothers’ Differential Treatment of Adolescent Siblings: Predicting College Attendance of Sisters Versus Brothers. J Youth Adolescence 41, 1267–1279 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-011-9727-6

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