Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn both industrial and developing societies, the school has become an important link between an individual's family of origin and occupational attainment. More often, cognitive achievement as determined by examination results is used to allocate starting points in the occupational hierarchy. Perhaps the most significant attempt to explain how schooling functions as an intervening mechanism is the research tradition of William H. Sewell, A.O. Haller and G. Olendorf at the University of Wisconsin.' The purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which the socio-economic background and other intervening factors continue to influence cognitive ability and achievement in Indonesia. The first part of the paper provides some brief comments on comparative research in non-western countries. The second part elaborates on the data and measures used in the case of Indonesia. The final section reports the finding for cognitive ability and achievement among 9,751 ninth grade students in Indonesia.

In this paper, we describe the measurement of cognitive ability in the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), especially for verbal skill, mathematical skill, memory, and quantitative reasoning. The available CFPS cognitive measurements can be useful for studies on the importance of cognitive ability in many substantive domains of interest. Using the CFPS data, we show that measures of cognitive ability are clearly related to key demographic and social characteristics, such as age, gender, education, and hukou status. We also illustrate how cognitive ability influences school performance and deviant behaviors among children, income and political capital among adults, and daily functioning among the elderly.

Background In ageing populations it is increasingly important to understand what contributes to health and wellbeing in later life. Older adults in particular are prone to function-limiting health issues which impair their ability to be productive and live independently. The incidence of stroke – one of the most common morbidities among older adults – has been shown to be predicted by early-life cognitive ability, such that those with higher cognitive ability are at lower risk. However, less is known about the role that early-life cognitive ability plays in recovery from stroke.
Aim Investigate the association between early-life circumstances, particularly cognitive ability, and later-life recovery from stroke.
Methods Using a large sample of individuals born in Scotland in 1936, historic data from the Scottish Mental Survey 1947 will be linked to administrative and healthcare records from across the life course. Incidence of stroke can be identified using healthcare records prior to 2011, and later functional outcomes will be extracted from the Scottish Stroke Care Audit and from Scottish Censuses 2001 and 2011.
Analysis Multiple regression models will be used to examine associations between early-life variables and changes in post-morbid general health and physical function among those experiencing stroke prior to 2011. Time since morbidity, number of morbidity events prior to follow-up, and severity of morbidity will be included as covariates. Analyses will be stratified by type of stroke to account for heterogeneity in aetiology, and recovery profiles will be compared between different types of stroke where possible.

The relation between individual trait differences, social mobility and social structure is central to social biology. Because genetic variance underlies phenotypic variance in some of these traits, for example IQ, several mechanisms determine the population variance. Polygenic inheritance is the basic mechanism. Social mobility and assortative partner choice distribute the trait variance within generations. This feedback circle is constrained by sociological conditions at several levels of analysis. Fundamental to this theory of social assortment is the relation between social–biological traits and social class on the one hand, and these traits and social mobility on the other hand. The focus here is on the relation between social class, social mobility and cognitive ability. The National Child Development Study is drawn upon, including the last follow-up (1999–2000). By approaching this relationship through various methods, both social–biological and sociological aspects of this research question can be assessed.

"Taller workers receive a substantial wage premium. Studies extending back to the middle of the last century attribute the premium to non-cognitive abilities, which are associated with stature and rewarded in the labor market. More recent research argues that cognitive abilities explain the stature-wage relationship. This paper reconciles the competing views by recognizing that net nutrition, a major determinant of adult height, is integral to our cognitive and non-cognitive development. Using data from Britain's National Childhood Development Study (NCDS), we show that taller children have higher average cognitive and non-cognitive test scores, and that each aptitude accounts for a substantial and roughly equal portion of the stature premium. Together these abilities explain why taller people have higher wages"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Education is negatively associated with mortality for most major causes of death. The literature ignores that cause-specific hazard rates are interdependent and that education and mortality both depend on cognitive ability. We analyze the education-mortality gradient at ages 18-63 using Swedish register data. We focus on months lost due to a specific cause of death which solves the interdependence problem, and use a structural model that derives cognitive ability from military conscription IQ scores. We derive the educational gains in months lost and the selection effects for each cause of death, and quantify the selection contribution of observed characteristics and unobserved cognitive ability. In a standard Cox model that controls for observed IQ, primary education was associated with 6 months lost when compared to secondary education. In a structural model that accounts for cognitive ability the difference was 43% larger. In addition, the largest educational gains were achieved for the lowest education group in the reduction of external cause mortality. The educational gains in cardiovascular mortality was small, mainly due to large selection effects. These results suggest that educational differences in cause specific mortality may be biased by conventional Cox regression analyses.