Abstract
This article outlines Breen and Goldthorp's theory of educational attainment and relative risk aversion hypothesis, and then, tests how well relative risk aversion explains the class differences in educational attainment in Japan.
According to the relative risk aversion hypothesis, young people and their parents want them to acquire a level of education that will allow them to avoid downward social mobility, and thus, the members of different classes pursue different levels of education. As a result of these processes, class differences in educational attainment persist. The author analyzed the Japanese panel data collected in 1979 and 2006 to test this hypothesis, and found that (1)a father's occupation affected his expectation of his child's occupational attainment, (2)his expectation of his child's occupational attainment affected his expectation of his child's educational attainment, and (3)his expectation of his child's educational attainment had an effect on the actual educational attainment of his child. However, these processes are rather independent of the processes by which a father's occupation affected his expectation of occupational and educational attainment for his child.
These results suggest that the effects of occupational expectation on educational expectation and of educational expectation on educational attainment are not intermeditative but additive in the Japanese society. As a result, Breen and Goldthorpe's claim that relative risk aversion is a central factor to explain the effect of class on educational attainment was not supported.
