Publications

This paper analyzes how the Great Recession affected the drop-out rate among university students in Italy, and whether their chosen field of study moderated its effect. To examine the potential effects of the crisis on social inequality, we also explore whether students from less-advantaged families who were enrolled in prestigious courses of study were those pushed out of university in disproportionally high numbers. We investigate the interacting influence of economic crisis, social inequalities and field of study on drop-out rate using data from the Istat “Survey on the educational and occupational paths of high school graduates” in two cohorts of university students. Results using propensity score matching show that the economic crisis had a negative effect on university participation. In addition, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the most remunerative fields of study tended to leave university more often than their well-off peers. 

We aim to investigate the extent to which children of immigrants achieve lower levels of academic proficiency in reading and mathematics compared to native students in compulsory education in Italy. Advancing the current literature, we investigate in a more comprehensive way the importance of a variety of individual characteristics in accounting for children of immigrants’ penalties. In particular, we examine the role of family structure, parents’ socio-economic resources, parents’ cultural and educational resources and students’ school-related attitudes and behaviour. The empirical analysis makes use of a unique dataset collected by the National Institute for the Evaluation of the Italian School System (INVALSI) on the whole population of students enrolled in primary school (5th grade) and lower secondary education (6th grade) in 2012. We apply Kitagawa-Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition models to identify the net contribution of each characteristic to the disadvantages faced by immigrant offspring. We found partial support for the composition hypothesis (socio-economic resources) and culturalist explanations (especially language spoken at home), but pupils’ school-related attitudes – which received less attention in the previous literature – also contribute to explaining the gaps, especially in lower secondary school.

While attitudes towards death and dying have attracted much scholarly attention, surprisingly little is known about the practice of visiting cemeteries. According to the secularization thesis, the fate of cemetery visits conforms with declining church attendance. A de-secularization theory suggests that, in the modern world, cemeteries increasingly became spaces for a society of families rather than for a religious community, suggesting that visiting the tombs of the dead might grow alongside secularization. Finally, a ‘civic community’ theory, inspired by Putnam's work, sees cemetery visits as an expression of a social obligation among and across generations rather than a religious activity.Analyzing one of the least secular countries in Europe, Italy, we attempt to respond to an apparent paradox: Why is the share of people paying tribute to their deceased loved ones at cemeteries in areas of greater secularization higher than in more religious areas? We take advantage of a rich time use dataset from a representative sample of Italian families surveyed in 2013. To test our hypotheses, we run a series of nested logistic regressions for the probability of visiting the cemetery, jointly considering both individual and contextual features. Our results confirm that individual religiosity is a pivotal predictor of cemetery visits. Yet, even after controlling for religiosity, the probability of visiting a cemetery remains higher among people living in the more secularized part of the country. Our models show that one important reason for this divide is the different level of civicness, here measured at province level. Hence, net of individual religiosity, the frequency of cemetery visits increases with level of civicness in a community. If religious people visit cemeteries in order to pray for the dead, our results also provide support for the hypothesis that the non-religious people living in civic societies visit cemeteries as way to connect with past generations and with their own communities. Our results are thus consistent with the civicness hypothesis, with the caveat that religion and civicness do not seem to cancel each other out.

In this paper, we analyse social inequalities along the horizontal dimension of education in Italy. More precisely, we focus on the role of family background in completing specific fields of study at both secondary and tertiary levels of education. To mitigate the limitations of the traditional sequential model, we construct a typology of educational paths based on two axes: the prestige of one’s choice of high school track (academic or vocational) and the labour market returns of the university field of study in terms of monthly net income (high or low). We identify four paths: academic-high, academic-low, vocational-high, and vocational-low. We investigate the influence of social inequalities on educational path using data from the Istat “Survey on the transition to work of University graduates” regarding cohorts of university graduates in 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2007. Results obtained from multinomial logistic regressions confirm predictions based on rational action theory. We find that family background, defined in terms of parental education, is positively and significantly associated with the completion of the most advantageous educational path. Moreover, we find that high-performing students from lower socio-economic backgrounds show a higher probability of completing the vocational-high path. This result suggests that a vocational upper secondary degree could be perceived as a sort of safety option for students from less wealthy families, which allows them to invest in the most lucrative and risky fields at university.

in: Sociology of Europeanization
edited by Büttner S.M., Eigmüller M. & Worschech S.
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
pages 259–282  

➡ https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110673630-011/html

in: Economic and Social Perspectives on European Migration
edited by Fauri F., Mantovani D. & Strangio D.
Routledge Studies in Labour Economics
pages 200-227

➡www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003045915-14/free-bounded-eleonora-vlach

in: Uno Sguardo sulla Scuola. Il seminario 'I dati INVALSI': uno strumento per la ricerca
edited by Patrizia Falzetti
Milano: Franco Angeli
pages 73–93 

➡ #openaccess https://series.francoangeli.it/index.php/oa/catalog/book/372

University of Trento Eprints.PhD 

➡ #openaccess http://eprints-phd.biblio.unitn.it/2059/1/Vlach_Eleonora_-_Tesi_PhD_2017.pdf

CAMBIO Rivista sulle trasformazioni Sociali
Volume 3, Issue 6, pages 147-158 

➡ #openaccess https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/cambio/article/view/1246

with Fiorini C. & Sciortino G.

Università degli Studi di Trento - Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale