Youths’ school success partly depends on the degree to which their dispositions towards school match educational norms and teachers’ expectations. According to sociocultural reproduction theory, children’s academic habitus is based on social class differences in parenting styles and cultural upbringing, yielding a “system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 86). Interestingly, despite the relevance of (non-cognitive) dispositions for educational success (Farkas, 2003), habitus theory is still rarely used as a coherent theoretical underpinning to guide sociological research on students’ approaches to learning and attitudes towards school. Instead, the conceptual vacuum is often filled by concepts borrowed from educational psychology.

In addition, there is a noticeable gap between qualitative and quantitative methodologies in regard to how both approaches are applied to study habitus as a key driver of inequalities in academic success. Qualitative researchers have long used habitus to describe the biographical processes of students’ adjustment to the norms and cultures of schools and universities (Barrett & Martina, 2012; Helsper, Kramer, Thiersch, & Ziems, 2009; Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2009). Nash (2002) identified particular dimensions of students’ habitus, such as self-concept, aspiration, the perception of schooling, and above all, students’ notion (and role model) of a well-educated person as being crucial to school success.

Unlike in the qualitative paradigm, quantitative researchers on students’ habitus have often shied away from the concept in favour of focusing on cultural capital (e.g., Barone, 2006; Jaeger & Mollegaard, 2017; de Graaf, de Graaf, & Kraaykamp, 2000). However, Dumais (2002, 2006), Gaddis (2013) and Bodovski (2010, 2013) called for increased efforts to operationalize habitus for use in quantitative studies to sociologically examine how a student’s habitus relates to key background variables such as family cultural capital and social class, and to assess its impact on academic outcomes. Accordingly, Gaddis (2012) could demonstrate that habitus explains part of the correlation between students’ social class and educational success.

Past efforts to quantify habitus were limited by the existing data sets. Until now, quantitative researchers using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus have mostly relied on the variables available in secondary data sets: Those off-the-shelf variables mostly either stem from educational psychology such as the locus of control scale used by Bodovski (2013) or they are single-item measures of attitudes and evaluations regarding students’ future careers, e.g. their expected occupations (Dumais, 2006). As van de Werfhorst (2010, p. 158) argues, at least some of those variables were originally designed to test hypotheses on educational inequality that compete with Bourdieuian theory, i.e. assumptions based on rational-action-theory. Due to the lack of suitable instruments for measuring students’ academic habitus within a coherent conceptual framework, we argue that a mixed-method study offers a viable opportunity to combine the necessary conceptual groundwork with an empirical study of habitus. 

We address three questions: First, we investigate which dispositions of students towards school and learning make up the main dimensions of students’ academic habitus as expressed in focus group discussions with 7th graders in Luxembourg. Second, we explore whether there are different types of academic habitus that can be measured by a set of questionnaire items, which function as indicators in latent class analyses (Magidson & Vermunt, 2004). Third, we test how students’ habitus relates to various axes of inequality such as social class and parental level of education. This final step of analysis aims at validating the typology by evaluating to what extent habitus works as suggested by sociocultural reproduction theory.

The present study uses data from 7th-grade students in Luxembourgish secondary schools who participated in the international SASAL-study (“School Alienation in Switzerland and Luxembourg”), which is aimed at analyzing and understanding processes of school alienation and its relation to school success. Our analyses are based on two independent subsamples, which are made up of qualitative data from group discussions with n = 23 students (conducted in fall 2017), and of a quantitative sample of n = 387 students (fall 2016). The subsamples have been conceptualized as independent because of ethical considerations. The quantitative analyses take the design effect into account that due to the sampling procedure students are clustered in 32 classrooms within four schools by adjusting the standard errors accordingly. The analyses follow a three-step approach: The first step is to analyze the qualitative data using open coding based on Grounded Theory Methodology (Strauß & Corbin 1996) to identify key dimensions of students’ academic habitus. In the second step, we build on these dimensions to distinguish different types of students’ habitus. We employ a set of five categorical indicators to estimate various latent class models using the Latent Gold software package. Based on the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) and Chi-squared test statistics, a three-class model proves to be the best fitting model. To classify the complete sample into the three ordered habitus clusters, we specify a covariate model using a classify-analyze approach to avoid estimation bias in the subsequent regression analysis (Bray, Lanza & Tan, 2015). The ten covariates included in the full model are: 1. number of books at home), 2. highbrow cultural activities, 3. parents’ social class (0 = middle-class, 1 = working-class), 4. father’s employment status (0 = unemployed, 1 = part-time, 2 = full-time), 5. mother’s employment status (0 = unemployed, 1 = part-time, 2 = full-time), 6. parental level of education (0 = no academic degree, 1 = either one or both parents have academic degree), 7. immigrant background (0 = native Luxembourgish, 1 = one foreign-born parent, 2 = both parents born outside Luxembourg, 3 = student born outside Luxembourg), 8. gender (1 = female, 2 = male), 9. Educational aspiration (0 = no higher education, 1 = higher education), and 10. students’ current grade-point-average. The third step of the analyses is to specify a non-linear regression model with the habitus types as the dependent variable and sociodemographic and cultural background variables as predictors.

Qualitative findings on students’ dispositions towards school and learning Our classroom discussions showed that, for many students, success in school largely depends on the degree to which they meet school norms and teachers’ expectations regarding their orientations towards learning and the general value of education. How students differ in their dispositions shows the extent to which their academic habitus matches institutionally legitimate schemes of perception, thinking and practice (Barrett & Martina, 2012). Appropriate orientations not only include students’ endorsement of learning contents, teachers and the school community but even more so do legitimate ways of thinking refer to how students see themselves. Students are expected to assert agency by preparing for tests, by learning beyond the classroom and to hold self-beliefs regarding their ability to succeed in school. The qualitative data reveal five dimensions of students’ academic habitus: 1. self-discipline, 2. confidence, 3. internalized school norms and educational values, 4. ambitiousness, and 5. willingness to work hard beyond the classroom. These dimensions form students’ habitus in that they show how well a student fits in with the mainstream education system and its dominant culture of performance. The latent class analyses resulted in three types of academic habitus: (1) excellence, (2) mediocrity and goodwill, (3) disengagement. The five indicator items significantly discriminate between the three classes. Yet, internalized school norms are held in high regard by all students, albeit students in the mid- and high-level habitus cluster show particularly high levels of conformism. All students irrespective of their academic mentality share a strong belief in the school system and its credentialism. The subsequent regression models underscore that the habitus types are related to various aspects of students’ social background.

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