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The present study assesses how sibship size affects child quality as measured by educational attainment.

The data are from the Canadian General Social Surveys (GSS) of 1986, 1990, 1994 and 1995. The sample is restricted to the individuals born in Canada between 1946 and 1965, that is, the baby-boom generation. In addition to controlling for parental education, the sibship size is instrumented by a non-binary variable created based on the sex composition of the sibship. While most previous studies have pooled both genders, the present paper produces by gender estimates

The OLS estimates are statistically significant, negative and moderately large for both male and female baby boomers. When the sibship size is instrumented, the estimates indicate that one additional sibling had reduced the educational attainment of male baby boomers by almost half a year. No causal effect for the sibship size is found for female baby boomers.

This is the first paper on the effects of sibship size on educational attainment, using Canadian data.

This paper explores how siblings act as agents of consumer socialisation within the dynamics of the family network.

Key consumer socialisation literature is reviewed, highlighting the growing role that siblings play in the lives of contemporary children. The authors’ interpretive, exploratory study is introduced which captures the voices of children themselves through a series of in-depth interviews.

A series of socialisation behaviours are documented, with children working in both positive and negative ways to develop the consumer skills of their siblings. A fourfold typology of sibling relationships is described, capturing the dynamic of sibling relationships and parental approaches to parenting vis-à-vis consumption. This typology is then used to present a typology of nascent child consumer identities that begin to emerge as a result of socialisation processes within the family setting.

The role siblings play in the process of consumer socialisation has potentially important implications in terms of the understanding of the socialisation process itself, and where/how children obtain product information. Scope exists to explore the role siblings play as agents of consumer socialisation across a wider variety of family types/sibling variables presented here (e.g. to explore how age/gender shapes the dynamics of sibling–sibling learning).

Through adopting a networked approach to family life, the authors show how the wider family dynamic informs sibling–sibling relationships and resulting socialisation behaviours. The findings problematise the view that parents alone act as the main conduits of consumer learning within the family environment, highlighting how parent–child relationships, in turn, work to inform sibling–sibling socialisation behaviour and developing consumer identities.

Within individual countries, the paths towards increasing educational attainment are not always linear and individuals are not equally affected. Differences between boys’ and girls’ educational attainments are a common expression of this inequality as boys are more often favored for continued schooling. We examine the importance of birth cohort, sibship size, migration, and school accessibility for explaining both the gender gap and its narrowing in secondary schooling in one district in Northeast Thailand between 1984 and 1994. Birth cohort is a significant explanation for the narrowing of the gender gap. Migration, sibship size, and remote village location are important explanations for limited secondary education opportunities, especially for girls.

Although there has been much psychological research about children's sibling relations, it has been a neglected area of study in sociology (exceptions are Brannen et al., 2000; Kosonen, 1996; Mauthner, 2002). This paper, based on empirical research on siblings in Scotland, explores the nature of the generational power structure within families from children's perspectives. Childhood is a relational concept which forms part of the generational order. Alanen explains this as “a complex set of social processes through which people become (are constructed as) ‘children’ while other people become (are constructed as) ‘adults’” (2001, pp. 20, 21). Generational processes shape the nature of child-parent relations (Mayall, 2002). Alanen states that:one position (such as the parental position) cannot exist without the other (child) position; also what parenting is – that is, action in the position of a parent – is dependent on its relation to the action “performed” in the child position, and a change in one part is tied to change in the other (Alanen, 2001, p. 19).In other words, child-parent relations are based on the understanding that childhood is relational with parenthood (see also Mayall, 2002). Alanen (2001) argues that the social construction of childhood and adulthood involves a process, including the agency of both children and adults, which she refers to as a set of “practices”:It is through such practices that the two generational categories of children and adults are recurrently produced and therefore they stand in relations of connection and interaction, of interdependence (Alanen, 2001, p. 21).These practices of generationing may be “childing” practices through which people are constructed as children or “adulting” practices through which a distinct adult position is produced. The ways in which children in the present study talked about the differences between their relationships with their parents and their siblings indicated that there are a range of generationing practices that take place within families. They referred to particular kinds of behaviour that were acceptable to engage in with other children (in this case with their siblings) but not with their parents. Overwhelmingly the key issue which children highlighted as distinct between their relations with parents and siblings was the differential nature of power in these relationships. Whilst it is not surprising that children perceive the distribution of power to be more unequal between children and parents than between siblings, the aim of this paper is to explore the nature of this power and how it is experienced from children's point of view. In particular the paper discusses the ways in which children perceive child-parent relations compared with their sibling relationships in relation to the giving and receiving of power within the home.

Using data from the British National Childhood Development Study, this paper examines the quality–quantity trade-off in fertility in multiple measures of child achievement. The results exhibit three characteristics: (1) Family-size effects appear very early in child development – as early as age two; (2) the effects are found in a broad array of achievement measures: labor market, cognitive, physical, and social; and (3) by age 16, the effects of family size stop growing (and what little evidence there is of change after that is not consistently in one direction). The paper argues that these results are inconsistent with preference-based explanations of the trade-off and point to some family-resource constraint. However, the relevant constraint appears more likely to be temporal than financial.

This paper aims to reveal the effects of birth order in decision-making style, conflict handling style and propensity for participative decision-making. The intention is to open the perspective of birth order research in organizational studies, as an important individual difference of managers.

A survey was conducted with 230 managers from different industries in Kosovo. Self-report measures were used for decision-making style, conflict handling style and participatory decision-making constructs.

Results indicate that only children are more avoidant and spontaneous decision-makers. Firstborns are rational in decision-making and prefer problem-solving in conflict handling. Middleborns are intuitive decision-makers and use compromising in conflict handling. Lastborns make decisions rationally and use both compromising and problem-solving in conflicting situations. In addition, lastborns appeared to have a more positive attitude toward participative decision-making, followed by middleborns, firstborns and only children.

Birth order affects managers’ behaviors in decision-making and conflict situations. Relationship dynamics in sibships are reflected in organizational settings, affecting how people behave in decision-making and conflict handling.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to attest how birth order influences the ways managers make decisions, handle conflicts and involve others in decision-making. As birth order cannot be changed, such knowledge is critical.

Birth order studies have an established history in the academic world just as demographics have an established history in marketing. Discusses how birth order may influence several socio‐economic mechanisms and thereby influence select consumption behaviors. As a likely influence of certain consumption behaviors, birth order may be useful in segmenting certain markets. Offers a corporate advertising example to demonstrate the practical significance of investigating links among birth order, consumption, and market segmentation. Analysis of responses from 156 subjects who were shown the advertisement revealed birth order relationships. Few, if any, empirical studies currently link birth order, consumption, and segmentation, perhaps because of a priori convictions that such links do not exist. The time is at hand, however, to refute or confirm the existence of such links empirically. Offers five hypotheses for initiating research. Postulates characteristics of first borns, only children, middle borns and last borns with regard to selling. Discusses managerial implications.

Thailand’s modernization and shift to a wage labor economy has led to increases in children’s educational attainment. This research, in two rural northern Thai villages, explores globalizing labor markets, traditional familial roles, and parental bias of educational investment by children’s gender and birth position, using a human behavioral ecology (HBE) framework. Survival models suggest that northern Thailand’s matrilineal tendencies may be increasing, not decreasing, with globalization: daughters bearing long-term expectations of support and remittance are more heavily invested in than sons, from whom matrilines expect and receive less. Birth position strongly affects educational attainment, reflecting differential familial helper and provider roles.

Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is well established, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship is limited. This chapter applies a recently developed nonparametric estimator of the conditional local average treatment effect to assess the sensitivity of the quantity–quality trade-off to functional form and parametric assumptions. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of fertility, we find mixed evidence supporting the trade-off.