Welcome to my website.  My research interests include the sociology of education, social stratification and educational inequality, comparative educational research and quantitative methodology. I am currently working on four main research lines: i) Group membership inequality within and between school systems, and across the life course in Chile and the Americas; ii) Inequality of educational opportunity in access to higher education in Chile; iii) Wage inequalities and the value of education and skills in labour markets in the Americas; iv) Wealth effects on inequalities in a range of social outcomes.

I am a PhD (c) at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam and affiliated with the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies,  and the programme group Institutions, Inequalities and Life courses (IIL). My PhD research focuses on generating inequalities in individual educational outcomes, across educational pathways and how they vary under specific reforms and institutional arrangements, in Chile and Latin America.  My dissertation is currently under review.

Summary

The project examines the association between the social background and educational outcomes of students in Chilean and Latin American educational systems. The project is aimed to understand the micro-level mechanisms that drive the generation of inequalities in achievement and educational attainment, based on the distinction between primary and secondary effects. In addition, the focus on meso and macro-level mechanisms relies on mechanisms associated with group membership inequality and the institutional factors that foster or lessen social stratification of academic achievement. I use unique and recently available longitudinal census data from Chile, for different cohorts, a country case with a distinctive choice-driven and most privately sourced educational system, plus comparative data from a large-scale assessment for the Latin American region, which provides quality microdata for fifteen countries in combination with UNESCO/OECD country-level data.

Promotor:         Prof. dr. Herman van de Werfhorst

Co-promotor:            Prof. dr. Thijs Bol