Home resources as a measure of socio-economic status in Ghana

Abstract

In large scale international assessment studies, questionnaires are typical used to query students’ home possessions. Composite scores are computed from responses to the home resource questionnaires and are used as a measure of family socioeconomic background in achievement comparison or for statistical control. This paper deals with profiling the socio-economic status (SES) of Ghanaian students’ in the context of the TIMSS 2011 study. Latent class analysis was used to profile students into respective SES classes based on the students’ responses to 11 questions concerning their home resources. The results showed three clearly distinct socio-economic profiles: high-, middle- and low-SES. Moreover, a discriminate analysis was conducted to explore the degree to which the groups are accurately classified. The discriminant analysis was able to correctly classify 92.20% of the individual students into their appropriate SES group. A gender comparison of these classes suggested stable measurement invariance for the latent class indicators. This article contributes to addressing the composition of SES by providing statistical criteria to evaluate SES using empirical data.