Do Co-Residing Grandparents Alleviate the Negative Effect of Sibship Size on Educational Achievement?

Martin Kreidl, Masaryk University
Barbora Hubatková, Masaryk University

The paper investigates the effect that coresidence with grandparents in three-generation households has on the nature and size of the association between family size and reading test scores. Furthermore, we explore whether this interaction changes with the level of socioeconomic development of a society. We argue that coresidence in traditional three-generation households has a protective effect against resource dilution, and thus decreases the magnitude of the negative association between family size and test scores. We also argue that coresidence in more modern contexts magnifies the degree of this negative association, since modern families form three-generation households only when severely destabilized. We apply 3-level regression models to the PISA 2000 data to examine our hypotheses and use Human development index as a measure of development. We find that indeed the negative association between family size and test scores increases at higher levels of development.