The empirical and perspectival blank space ‘parents’ about the influence on parenthood on educational transition of adolescents

Abstract

The influence of parents on the educational transition and vocational orientation of adolescents and young adults is also widely discussed in the Swiss research context. Thereby, depending on the different disciplinary approaches, not only the theoretical way in which this influence is researched varies, but also the methodological framework in which ‘parents’ are constructed as a social category and problematizes as at “at-risk”. While, for example, pedagogical-psychological perspectives still point on the importance of parental support in matching process (keyword: parenting), sociological and economic perspective on education relying on rational-choice premises tend to emphasize the path dependency of parental origins – understood as social and national origins – on educational and vocational choices (keyword: secondary effects of origin). Despite their differences, both research poles share a “hidden” epistemological premise - namely: that they mainly talk about but hardly with parents when it comes to understanding their influence in this complex process. The aim of the article is to reconstruct how this empirical and perspectival blank space ‘parents’ developed in the pre-dominant research about the influence of parenthood in the context of vocational orientation of adolescents in Switzerland. In particular, the question is raised as how the attribution ‘migrant parents do not understand and recognize the value of the Swiss VET System’ emerged and established in educational sciences and policy context although the empirical evidence is controversial. To this end, the article reconstructs and analyses the (research) “genealogy” of this attribution while furthermore considering the reception in educational policy documents from federal and cantonal authorities.