Greater income inequality, lower school belonging

King, Chiu & Du (2022) published “Greater Income Inequality, Lower School Belonging: Multilevel and cross-temporal analyses of 65 countries” in Journal of Educational Psychology.  

I have written before about income inequality relative to cooperation and competition (Sommet et al., 2022), finding, in part “students from economically unequal countries perceive their schoolmates as more competitive and less cooperative . . . . [and] are oriented toward instrumental rather than intrinsic cooperativeness (i.e., using cooperation as a strategic tool to achieve academic success rather than for the enjoyment of the activity itself).” Here’s the abstract of King et al.’s article:

Students’ school belonging is critical to overall functioning. Most past studies of school belonging’s antecedents focused on individual-level and proximal environmental factors, neglecting broader socioecological factors such as income inequality. Hence, this study examined whether income inequality is associated with students’ school belonging. We further examined whether having high socioeconomic status could buffer the harmful consequences of income inequality on school belonging. We drew on 822,230 students’ survey responses from 65 countries/regions using 3 waves of data (2000; 2003; and 2012) from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Multilevel and cross-temporal analyses were used. Results showed that country-level income inequality in the past year was associated with lower school belonging, controlling for other variables at the country, school, and student-levels. School and family socioeconomic status moderated the effects of inequality. More specifically, for students in more affluent schools and more advantaged families, the association between inequality and belonging was weaker. This study demonstrates the importance of income inequality and the buffering role played by socioeconomic status in school belonging. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. 

In that earlier blog, I expressed concern about the growing income inequality in the US. This research raises similar concerns in that it suggests that the relationship between high income inequality and low school belonging has more adverse impacts on middle and low income students. The huge data set should encourage practitioners who work with school age clients to ask good questions about the school climate and its possible adverse impacts on student engagement.