Concerns related to school are consistently ranked as among the greatest stressors in the lives of adolescents. Research from varying contexts report rising rates of school-related stress among students, but we currently lack knowledge on what drives these trends. The aim of this study is to investigate the predictors of temporal trends in…

This article explores emotional aspects of national grade policies in Sweden as they are enacted in feedback practices at middle school level. Policy measures such as standardized testing and grades have over the last decades put emphasis on academic outcomes in Sweden. However, research suggests that this emphasis can impact students' emotions…

High aspirations can be an important factor for educational attainment, especially for youth in disadvantaged schools who are otherwise more likely to leave school early. In this article, I study the relationships between pre-migration status, social capital, and educational aspirations among youth in disadvantaged Swedish schools, using data on…

For young women, inbound identity trajectories into physics are generally regarded as exceptional. In this study, we investigated the experiences that young women have which may support their sustained interest and achievement in physics, and their ongoing inbound trajectories into post-secondary physics education. To understand these experiences,…

This article analyzes choice strategies among a group of Somali Swedes at a Muslim-profiled compulsory school. In the Swedish debate these schools are alleged to be divisive, with values incompatible with the goals of Swedish schools. The study explores whether there are other reasons behind school choice than the school's faith profile,…

The paper explores factors of importance for young people's choice of upper secondary education and for their future life, from a student perspective. The paper builds on data from a questionnaire study, answered by 1,414 students in grade 9 (age 15-16) in Sweden, prior to their choice of upper secondary school. In addition, data from earlier…

Why is it that children of immigrants often outdo their ethnic majority peers in educational aspirations yet struggle to keep pace with their achievements? This article advances the explanation that many immigrant communities, while positively selected on education, still have moderate absolute levels of schooling. Therefore, parents' education…

This article examines how Muslim girls of Somali origin raised in Sweden imagine their adulthood in regard to career and family life. The theoretical framework is social constructionist in that it assumes that children have agency and are capable and competent actors, in contrast to what has previously been generally assumed about children from…

In this paper, we develop an information distortion model (IDM) of social class differences in self-beliefs and values. The IDM combines psychological biases on frame-of-reference effects with sociological foci on ability stratification. This combination is hypothesized to lead to working-class children having more positive math self-beliefs and…

The aim of this study is to explore the determinants of the educational expectations of young people in disadvantaged urban areas in three large cities in Sweden. In addition to the conventional predictors such as parental resources (economic and cultural capital) and demographic characteristics (such as age, gender, immigration background), this…

This paper draws on the concept of parental involvement, popular among educators and policy-makers, in investigating differences in level of attained education by family background. The question is if parental involvement in children's schooling at age 14 acts as a mediator between family resources and mid-life level of attained education. Using…

Severe socioeconomic inequality strongly suppresses and distorts the discovery of aspirations and the concomitant development of talents among the gifted. More comprehensive understanding of this suppression and distortion is available through a wide-ranging interdisciplinary search for research findings and theories that illuminate economic,…

Astonishingly little is known about the relationship between high educational achievements and suicidal behaviour among women. This is remarkable given that a woman breaking into traditionally male-dominant spheres is a well established example of social-role marginality. The current study combines fatal and non-fatal suicidal behaviour and…

In this study, first- and second-order confirmatory factor analyses were used to investigate the structure of the different types of academic, social, and future goals pursued by adolescents in school, and whether goals can be hierarchically organized. A multiple goals perspective on goal preferences was adopted. The study was based on 10,000…

We ask whether a social contrast mechanism depresses the educational aspirations of students with high-achieving peers. We study two entire cohorts of students in the final grade of the Swedish comprehensive school with matched information on social origin and achievements (160,417 students, 829 schools). Controlling for school fixed effects and…