Doctoral Dissertation Research: Detained Potential-Associative Stigma as a Core Mechanism Behind Educational Inequality for Children of Incarcerated Parents

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Educational inequality is a persistent issue in American life. Research examining education and intergenerational mobility has concentrated on analyzing how social class, race, and ethnicity shape educational trajectories. While parental incarceration is another characteristic that may shape educational inequality, it has been widely been ignored. This project will consider whether and how the stigma of parental incarceration contributes to inequality through differential teacher expectations and treatment. Teacher expectations and behaviors in school have implications for educational achievement and attainment, which structure the opportunities and trajectories of youth as they move into adulthood and the labor market. These implications have long-term consequences for income, social class, wellbeing, and health. Understanding how stigma affects teachers’ assessments of students of incarcerated parents and evaluations of student school work will advance research by incorporating parental incarceration into analysis of the key determinants of educational inequality. Findings from the project will inform interventions in schools and influence training of teachers, so as to support educational equality and upward mobility, thus advancing American prosperity. Educational inequality limits upward mobility, and the stigma of parental incarceration may influence teachers’ expectations and behaviors, which in turn influence student achievement and attainment. To explore the role of stigma in teachers’ assessments of youth and their work, this project will employ an experimental design. Eight hundred and fifty high school teachers will receive a student biography with randomly assigned parental incarceration status: paternal, maternal, or none. Then they will complete a series of tasks that relate to student academic skills and behaviors. Participants will grade and provide feedback on the student’s writing sample and evaluate the student’s competency. Then, participants will respond to questions about student behavioral incidents and create behavioral management plans. Finally, participants will respond to a series of questions about themselves and the experiment. This experiment will create qualitative and quantitative data for analysis. The quantitative data, including the writing score, length of feedback, assessment of student competency, and behavioral response questions, will be analyzed using t-tests and regression to compare the intervention groups, paternal and maternal incarceration, to the control group of no parental incarceration. The qualitative data will be analyzed using a general inductive method to explore differences in the tone, texture, and style between the intervention groups and control group. Findings from the project will inform social psychological theories of stigma, and inform sociological theories related to educational inequality and social mobility. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.