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Social Indicators Research

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19-04-2018

Academic Resilience Among Children from Disadvantaged Social Groups in India

Author: Dhiman Das

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 2/2019

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Abstract

There has been significant progress in educational attainment in India since its independence. Yet the achievements are low in comparison to countries in similar stages of development. The situation is worse among groups who have a history of exclusion. Children from these groups have lower enrollment and higher dropout rates than national averages. Yet some of them are able to overcome these limitations and show academic resilience. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey (2005), we study the role of the different child, household, and school-level factors associated with academic resilience among these children. Further, to understand the mechanism through which group membership affects resilience we also study the indirect effect of group membership mediated through those factors. We find that the protective factors vary across the different disadvantaged groups. The main effect of group membership is through structural factors like poverty and maternal education. Yet, the child level and household level factors play an important role in most cases. Schools fail to play the expected role of being the source of resilience among those who face the strongest burden of structural factors. For some, the schools are the main site where they experience most of the adversities of group memberships. The results highlight the need for educational policy, which addresses the importance of schools as drivers and determinants of academic resilience.

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The SCs constitute 16%, the STs 8%, and the Muslims 13% of the total population.

The SCs include 1108 different castes, STs include close to 744 different tribes, and Muslims are generally of three broad groups based on their ancestry, though there are substantial regional variations of sub-groups.

An extensive discussion on the origins and the current state of these groups is beyond the scope of this paper. Interested readers may refer to Beteille (1969) and Gupta and Madan (1992) for SC, Ghurye (1980) and Xaxa (2008) for ST, and Sachar et al. (2006) and Basant and Shariff (2010) for additional information.

There are no explicit reservations based on religion except for a few states. However, some in the Muslim community are eligible for reservation through their Other Backward Class status introduced since 2006.

Learning efficiency includes various factors like innate abilities, child and parental motivation, parental involvement, and school quality. Educational inputs include factors like expenditure on education, time spent in learning, and school infrastructure.

This specification also reflects (Garmezy 1991) triadic model of resilience which describes the dynamic interactions among risk and protective factors on three levels—individual family and environment.

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Title: Academic Resilience Among Children from Disadvantaged Social Groups in India
Author: Dhiman Das
Publication date: 19-04-2018
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Social Indicators Research / Issue 2/2019
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1899-y

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