ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter we put forward our argument for a focus on the particular role that parents’ education plays in the achievement of their children and paid particular attention to issues of defining and measuring education and establishing causal effects. These discussions highlight some of the difficulties in understanding and conceptualising education effects. In this chapter, to clarify this hypothesis further and to structure the summary of the diverse literature reviewed, we describe in detail our model for understanding these intergenerational effects and the theoretical framework underpinning it. Recognising the importance of different strands of research across different disciplines, this presentation is followed by a discussion of the complementarities and tensions between alternative models and approaches and sets out some of the resulting caveats of our approach.