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A Look Back at the 7th NEPS Conference

12/14/2022

The 7th International NEPS Conference of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) took place again in virtual format this year on December 5 and 6. About 300 scientists from Germany and abroad met for exchange. On the first day of the conference, the "NEPS Publication Award" was again presented for outstanding papers based on NEPS data - this year it had been awarded to Barcelona and Dublin. The two-day conference was organized by the team of the LIfBi Research Data Center (FDZ-LIfBi).

In 18 virtual sessions, a wide range of contributions on various topics of longitudinal educational research were presented and discussed. Although the National Educational Panel with its now seven starting cohorts provided the framework, the total of 48 conference contributions and eight poster presentations were not exclusively limited to analyses of NEPS data.

To the Schedule with Abstracts

To the Poster-Abstracts


Keynote
Professor Regina T. Riphahn from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg was invited to give the keynote lecture at this year's NEPS conference, which is also a contribution to the LIfBi Lectures series. The Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina impressively explained to the audience in the Wilhelmspost and online that the state subsidization of mini-jobs (marginal employment) has unintended long-term negative effects on the income of mothers that persist up to 10 years after the first birth. Her conclusion: "Not only does the mini-job program appear to fail as a stepping stone to regular employment, but it also harms mothers' labor market success, reinforces the existing penalties of motherhood in the labor market, and hinders the availability and development of a skilled workforce."


Publication Award
This year's NEPS Publication Prize, which includes prize money of 1,000 euros, was awarded to Assistant Professor Giampiero Passaretta (Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona) and Professor Dr. Jan Skopek (Trinity College Dublin). For their publication in the prestigious American Sociological Review, the two researchers used data from the National Educational Panel (Start Cohort 2) to investigate whether schools are able to compensate for social inequalities. The results clearly indicate that children's learning performance in all domains increases with increasing duration of schooling, but they provide no evidence that these effects differ by children's socioeconomic background. Thus, they conclude that children benefit from schooling regardless of their family background and that the effect of schooling neither reduces nor increases existing social inequality in educational achievement. Passaretta and Skopek conclude by focusing on the embeddedness of schools in the broader social context of social stratification. For the German school system, their findings imply that so far both its role as a driver of social inequality and its role as a social equalizer have been overestimated. Instead, the researchers suggest that, depending on the context, school has no effect on social inequality in cognitive achievement.


Passaretta, G. & Skopek, J. (2021). Does schooling decrease socioeconomic inequality in early achievement? A differential exposure approach. American Sociological Review, 86(6), 1017-1042. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211049188
 


Keynote speaker Prof. Regina T. Riphahn, Ph.D.

 
Prof. Dr. Christian Aßmann presenting the NEPS publication award.

 
Virtual conference room in Gather.town