Educational Attainment in Local Origin-Based Groups

Specialeforsvar: Asger Andersen

Titel: Educational Attainment in Local Origin-Based Groups

Abstract: This thesis analyses a dataset of the children of refugees, who came to Denmark between 1985 and 2005 from the following eight countries: Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. It uses geocoded addresses to determine the locality of each of the individuals, defined as the town / city where
(s)he lived at the age of 13. Individuals, who share locality and country of origin, are called a local origin-based group. The goal of this thesis is to use logistic mixed-effects modelling to quantify the extent of unexplained variation in educational attainment between these local origin-based groups, when controlling for a basic set of individual-levelcharacteristics and across-origin locality effects. To do this, it proposes some measures, called the Expected Risk Difference (ERD) and Expected Relative Risk (ERR), which use the estimated distribution of random intercepts in logistic mixed-effects models to calculate measures of the scale of unexplained between-group variation of the outcome. These measures are inspired by an already developed measure, called the Median Odds Ratio (MOR), but are distinct by being interpretable with respect to the probability of the outcome, instead of the odds of the outcome. Applying the ERD, ERR and MOR measures, this thesis estimates the extent of unexplained variation in educational attainment between local origin-based groups to be moderate. Thus, it suggests that local origin-based groups could be a useful construct for further research about the processes, which determine the educational outcomes of refugee descendants in Denmark.

Vejleder: Niels RIchard Hansen
Censor: Anders Stockmarr, DTU