Educational Achievement and Family Structure: Evidence from Two Cohorts of Adolescents in Taiwan

In addition to Coleman’s theory of social capital in explaining family background on children’s educational achievement, researchers also hypothesized the mediating mechanisms being (1) deprivation of economic resources, (2) lesser parental involvement and monitoring in children’s education, and (3) fewer network ties to obtain information and other supports related to learning. Indeed, strong evidence has emerged in research findings that both stepparent families and single-parent families have adverse effects on children’s educational achievement, which may be accounted for by the lack of social capital for children in stepparent families and inadequacy of the resources in single-parent family. On the other hand, there was some evidence found in the U. S. that children of single-parent families with grandparent(s) cohabitating performed quite similarly to those of intact families. Thus, an additional close adult relative at home seemed to compensate for the loss of one parent that single-parent families suffer, with the grandparent bringing into the family additional social capital and resources. However, does this mean that the cohabitating grandparent in the single-parent family provides the same advantage as a parent? If so, does the cohabitation of grandparent(s) in an intact family bring an additional advantage to the children, too? How much larger? In this paper, we want to answer the research questions by comparing impacts on the educational achievement of children from nuclear intact families, multigenerational intact families, multigenerational single-parent families, single-parent families, and the ‘all other types of non-intact’ families. We are going to use Taiwan’s nationally representative student data for the research. Moreover, in light of the possibilities that the impacts of family characteristics on young children (before entering the 7 grade) and adolescents (since the 7 grade) may well be different, we compare two cohorts of students at 7 and 11 grade surveyed by TEPS in 2001, respectively, to examine if the impacts of family structure and functioning change. As expected, in comparison with nuclear intact family, four other types of family structure have significant effects on 7 graders’ educational achievement in our final regression analysis. The result shows that living with grandparent(s) provides an additional advantage. Living with a grandparent can either increase slightly the positive effect of living in an intact family or reduce considerably (a little one half of) the negative effect of living with a single parent. Overall, the findings of the analysis of 11 graders’ educational achievement show that the impact of family structure has weakened. For the 11 cohort, the result of the final regression model indicated that co-residing grandparent(s) in an intact family still bring a small but significant positive contribution to grandchildren’s educational achievement. Co-residing grandparents also assist grandchildren living in single-parent families to perform as well as those living in nuclear intact families. The inclusion of various kinds of resources in the final regression model also made the negative effect of single-parent on children’s performance disappear. Those living in all other types of non-intact families, however, still suffer the negative effect of the absence of at least one biological parent in the family. In sum, our research reveals that the existence of grandparent(s) has qualitatively different effects on the offspring’s educational achievement depending on whether the family is intact or not. The findings also suggest that negative effects of non-intact families can be attributed to socialization practices and various kinds of resources do have differential effects on children of different developmental stages.