Research project Optimism trap or optimism springboard?
Young people in immigrant families have on average markedly higher educational and occupational aspirations than others, something often referred to as ‘immigrant optimism’. In this project, we assess whether higher aspirations are a help or a hindrance for young people with foreign-born parents.
The higher aspirations among youth with foreign-born parents may act as a compensating force that contributes to equalization of outcomes, but concerns have also been raised about an ‘optimism trap’, where high aspirations lead to demanding routes with high risks of non-completion.
We put economic and sociological theories on educational choice to use and build explicitly on counterfactuals: What are the potential alternative educational routes, and would young people with foreign born parents do better if they took them? To address this question we use full population register data on educational choices.
The project intends to use both causal methods to identify effects of educational choices and descriptive and exploratory methods to study educational pathways.
Project members
Project managers
Carina Mood
Professor
Members
Adam Altmejd Selder
Researcher
Andreas Gustafsson
PhD student
