Abstract
The issue of whether the social class of grandparents affects grandchildren’s socioeconomic outcomes net of the characteristics of the middle generation is much debated in the social mobility literature. Using data from the 2002 Chinese Household Income Project, we investigate the direct effects of grandparents on grandchildren’s educational attainment in rural China. We find that the influence of grandparents is contingent on living arrangements. Although the educational level of coresident grandparents directly affects the educational attainment of their grandchildren, with an effect size similar to that of parental education, the education of noncoresident and deceased grandparents does not have any effect. These findings suggest that grandparents can directly affect grandchildren’s educational outcomes through sociopsychological pathways. Our study not only adds an important case study to the literature but also sheds new light on theoretical interpretations of grandparent effects when they are found.
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Notes
The proportion of elderly living with adult children is much higher than the proportion of children living with grandparents because there are more young people than older people in both populations.
For example, among those who had ever been married, 94.6 % were currently married, 0.4 % were divorced, and 5.1 % were widowed.
We used the MI package in Stata 12 to impute the missing value of schooling for 228 paternal grandfathers, 655 paternal grandmothers, 313 maternal grandfathers, and 786 maternal grandmothers. The imputation used the predictive mean matching method with household income, grandparents’ characteristics (year of birth, survival status, and Communist Party membership) as well as parental characteristics (education and occupation) as inputs.
We also used enrollment status as the outcome variable in an earlier analysis with the logit model. The substantive results were similar and thus are not reported here. We prefer survival analysis because it uses information on the timing of dropout, whereas the enrollment analysis considers only current enrollment status.
Not all children have grandparents of all three types. This, however, does not affect the comparison of
, 
, and 
because each child has four grandparents and receives the input of four grandparent education terms on the right side of the equation.The original measure of occupation has 12 categories. The categories have been collapsed to three major occupation groups because many of the nonfarming occupations have very low frequencies.
The difference between noncoresident and coresident grandparents is statistically significant (p value < .01).
The p values of the null hypotheses that the coefficient of E C equals those of E NC and E D are .036 and .106, respectively.
This is calculated as 1 – exp(0.012 + 0.139 – 0.749 + 0.032) = 0.43.
, 
, and 
because each child has four grandparents and receives the input of four grandparent education terms on the right side of the equation.References
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Renmin University’s support of the analysis of the 2005 China Inter-Census Survey conducted by Xiwei Wu for this research. Yu Xie’s research is partially supported by Peking University and the University of Michigan through the Survey Research Center and the Population Studies Center, which receives core support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Grant R24HD041028. The ideas expressed herein are those of the authors.
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Zeng, Z., Xie, Y. The Effects of Grandparents on Children’s Schooling: Evidence From Rural China. Demography 51, 599–617 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0275-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0275-4