Self-reported Academic Grades in Social Surveys

Implications and Reliability during Third Year of Junior High School

Abstract

It is commonly believed that educational choices are only determined by academic grades. Despite controlling for academic grades, they are still affected by social class. Thus, academic grades constitute a crucial variable in empirical studies on education and social stratification. Since it is difficult to obtain data on academic grades through social surveys, many social surveys use a five-point Likert scale to measure academic grades. The scale aims to compare participantsʼ ranks during their third year of junior high school. In Japan, most junior high school students recognize their academic grades because they advance to high school through entrance examinations. Thus, this study hypothesized that self-reported academic grades are relatively fixed and correlate with high school rankings. The data from a longitudinal survey launched in 2012 focusing on second-year high school students and their mothers was used; and a follow-up survey was conducted in 2019. These surveys included questions regarding self-reported academic grades and high school names. Since academic grades were also repeatedly requested in the followup survey, we can compare the responses between 2012 and 2019. Each high school ranking score, which was calculated based on the relative position of academic grades, was estimated based on the name of the high school. Furthermore, we were able to compare self-reported academic grades with each high school ranking. The results showed that self-reported academic grades are reliable indices, since their responses can be regarded as consistent. Self-reported academic grades were related to each high school ranking, and this study did not find any notable tendency toward mismatch of responses. Based on logistic regression models, including variables predicting university acceptance, it was concluded that when conducting social surveys, self-reporting is an effective and simple method of obtaining information about academic grades.