overty of Aspiration? A Comparative Analysis of Educational and Occupational Aspirations of Teenagers in Three British Birth Cohort Studies

This doctoral project will make use of three large-scale nationally representative ESRC funded longitudinal datasets to undertake advanced statistical analyses of teenager's educational and occupational aspirations. The 2000/02 UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS), and the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) will be analysed.
Aspirations for education and work have come to be considered as important influences on young peoples' outcomes. Furthermore it is suggested that raising the aspirations of marginalised young people could reduce social and economic inequalities. Aspirational patterns have been previously studied using the three cohort studies individually.
The proposed project has two innovations:
1. It will study aspirational patterns in the MCS in a comparative framework that incorporates analyses of the older cohorts (the BCS and NCDS), in order to better understand underlying processes and longer term trends in educational and occupational aspirations.
2. It will extend current analyses of aspirations using the MCS by fully exploiting both the longitudinal nature of the data and the rich array of sociologically informed measures available.