Contextual effects on educational attainment in individualised, scalable neighbourhoods: Differences across gender and social class

This paper analyses whether a multi-scale representation of geographical context based on statistical aggregates computed for individualised neighbourhoods can lead to improved estimates of neighbourhood effect. Our study group consists of individuals born in 1980 that have lived in Sweden since 1995 and we analyse the effect of neighbourhood context at age 15 on educational outcome at age 30 controlling for parental background. A new piece of software, Equipop, was used to compute the socio-economic composition of neighbourhoods centred on individual residential locations and ranging in scale from including the nearest 12 to the nearest 25,600 neighbours. Our results indicate that context measures based on fixed geographical sub-divisions can lead to an underestimation of neighbourhood effects. A multi-scalar representation of geographical context also makes it easier to estimate how neighbourhood effects vary across different demographic groups. This indicates that scale-sensitive measures of geographical context could help to re-invigorate the neighbourhood effects literature.