Home resources as a measure of socio-economic status in Ghana
Open accessAbstract
In large scale international assessment studies, questionnaires are typical used to query students’ home possessions. Composite scores are computed from responses to the home resource questionnaires and are used as a measure of family socioeconomic background in achievement comparison or for statistical control. This paper deals with profiling the socio-economic status (SES) of Ghanaian students’ in the context of the TIMSS 2011 study. Latent class analysis was used to profile students into respective SES classes based on the students’ responses to 11 questions concerning their home resources. The results showed three clearly distinct socio-economic profiles: high-, middle- and low-SES. Moreover, a discriminate analysis was conducted to explore the degree to which the groups are accurately classified. The discriminant analysis was able to correctly classify 92.20% of the individual students into their appropriate SES group. A gender comparison of these classes suggested stable measurement invariance for the latent class indicators. This article contributes to addressing the composition of SES by providing statistical criteria to evaluate SES using empirical data.
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SES has been commonly used as a latent construct for measuring family background.
“SES has been commonly used as a latent construct for measuring family background (Bofah and Hannula 2017).”
From Socioeconomic Inequality and Educational Outcomes (2019) · cites this paper as Bofah and Hannula 2017
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Socioeconomic Inequality and Educational Outcomes
Broer, M., Bai, Y., & Fonseca, F. (2019) · IEA Research for Education · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-11991-1 · Cited by 145 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bofah, E. A.-T., & Hannula, M. S.
- Affiliations
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- Corresponding author
- Bofah, Emmanuel Adu-tutu
- ORCID
- Hannula, Markku S.
- Venue
- Large-scale Assessments in Education
- Published
- 2017-01-26
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2196-0739 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2582810329
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 4 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 1.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Large-scale Assessments in Education (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Psychometric Methodologies and Testing
- Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies
- Keywords
- home resources, socioeconomic status, TIMSS 2011, Ghanaian students, latent class analysis, measurement invariance, gender differences, student performance comparison
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