Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EFFORT (Effort and Social Inequality: Advancing Measurement and Understanding Parental Origin Effects) Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-08-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project Intergenerational social mobility has long been a hot topic in public and scholarly debates. The fact that children from privileged social origins enjoy considerable advantages over children from poorer backgrounds clashes with widespread notions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. In a meritocratic society, success in life should arguably depend on ability and effort. Yet, while ample knowledge exists about the distribution of ability, little is known about the distribution of effort within the population. Soundly established empirical facts about the relationship between social origins and effort are few and far between. As a result, effort has remained an elusive concept. The project pursues the following goals:1. To ascertain and document the degree of differences in children’s effort provision by parental socioeconomic background.2. To establish to what extent these effort differences between children of different social origins are the consequence of (a) the intergenerational inheritability of effort from parents to their children, and (b) varying motivations and differential susceptibility to various incentives.3. To identify the best methods to measure effort and to find out what kind of biases hamper the validity or reliability of various measurement techniques routinely employed in different scientific disciplines.Effort is conceived here as the extent to which finite cognitive resources are mobilized for task performance. In short, it refers to the act of ‘trying hard’. Specifically, the project will investigate how individuals from different social backgrounds differ in the effort they invest in order to obtain goals that are conducive to socioeconomic attainment. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far During the initial stages of the project, work centered on the particulars of the research design including its practical implementation. The key milestone of the project’s first half has been conducting laboratory experiments with groups of school children. Schools were randomly selected out of all primary schools in the Madrid metropolitan area. Then, the data gathering process was suddenly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, when progress was halfway in Madrid and collection had not even begun in Berlin.During the third reporting period, the entire data collection foreseen for the EFFORT project was finalized. In Madrid, a total of more than 750 children participated in laboratory experiments on the campus of HI UC3M. In Berlin, the project collected data from more than 500 children in primary school visits, under the responsibility of WZB. This amounts to a total of 62 experimental sessions carried out with fifth-grade students between the autumn of 2019 and the spring of 2022. The resultant data set opens new avenues to understanding social differences in effort. Moreover, more than 200 parents of participating students have carried out incentivized online experiments mirroring the same data we collected for their children. Based on this dyadic data, intergenerational transmission can be studied for the first time. With the large student data set and supplementary parental data, the project has met its data-gathering objectives in WP2.Moreover, the pupillometry experiments with children and parents were finalized as well, accomplishing the data collection objective in WP3. A total of 100 sessions (with 200 subjects) took place at the UNED lab for ocular measures in Madrid. These dyadic pupillometry data constitute a genuinely novel data source. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) This research is groundbreaking in at least three ways: a) by being the first sociological study to make use of cutting-edge methodologies of effort measurement developed in adjacent disciplines, pushing the frontier of knowledge on social mobility; b) by collecting the first reliable large-scale data on multiple measures of effort, changing the way effort is operationalized and thought about in various disciplines; c) by providing evidence that shall impact ongoing debates on meritocracy and equality of opportunity, thus helping to improve public policy and educational practices. Related documents EFFORT.jpg
