School completion: What we learn from different measures of family background

This paper examines how disadvantage affects educational outcomes, in this instance, Year 12 completion. While previous studies have found a strong link between parental education or occupational status and Year 12 completion, this research was able to capture a broader set of cultural, material and resource aspects of disadvantage. It did this by undertaking a comparative analysis of two datasets - the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), which collects the more familiar information about parental education and occupational status, and the Youth in Focus (YIF) survey, which provides an additional set of disadvantage measures, including family income and welfare receipt history, as well as information about the respondent's earlier educational experiences and risky behaviour.