Senior Lecturer in Education

• Email: katherin.barg@bristol.ac.uk
• Publications: research outputs listed within Explore Bristol Research

Keywords

• Social inequalities in education
• Parenting and parental involvement in education
• Teacher bias
• Large-scale survey data analysis
• Longitudinal data analysis

Biography and research interests

I am a Senior Lecturer in Education at the School of Education and member of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling (CMM), University of Bristol. Before I joined the University of Bristol, I was a Lecturer in Education at the University of Exeter and Lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences (Q-Step) at the University of Glasgow. I did my PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim.

My research interests revolve around social inequalities in education and focus on the relationship between social class background and children’s educational trajectories, school outcomes, and cognitive and socio-emotional development. I also study how social class, parental education and other parental resources and skills influence their parenting values, beliefs and the ways in which they get involved in their children’s education. I am also interested in social class, gender and ethnic biases in teacher judgements of student abilities, and teachers’ decisions including school track recommendations and ability grouping. Currently I am principle investigator on an ESRC funded project on social and ethnic biases in teacher assessments of the school performance of primary school students in England, Scotland, Germany and Ireland.  

In my research I mainly conduct statistical analyses of large-scale survey data such as national cohort studies. I have worked with longitudinal data sets including the Millennium Cohort Study, 1970 British Cohort Study, French panels of secondary school students (Panel d’élèves du second degré), German Socioeconomic Panel and British Household Panel Survey. I am also very interested in survey experiments and have applied propensity score matching in earlier publications.

Journal Articles

Barg, K., & Klein, M. (2024). Maternal Occupation-Specific Skills and Children’s Cognitive Development. Sociology, 58(1), 118-139. 

Barg, K. & W. Baker (2021). Better than Average? Parental competence beliefs and socio-economic background, Families, Relationships and Societies.

Goldstone, R., W. Baker & K. Barg (2021). A comparative perspective on social class inequalities in parental involvement in education: structural dynamics, institutional design, and cultural factors, Educational Review.

Barone, C., K. Barg & M. Ichou (2021). Relative risk aversion models: How plausible are their assumptions? Rationality & Society, 33 (2), 143-175.

Barg, K., S. Benham-Clarke & A. Mountford-Zimdars (2020). Investigating the Imagination of Possible and ‘Like-to-Avoid’ Selves among Higher Education Students from Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds at a Selective English University. Social Sciences, 9 (5), 1-20.

Baker, W. & K. Barg (2019). Parental values in the U.K. British Journal of Sociology. 70(5), 2092-2115.

Barg, K. (2019). An analysis of social class differentials in parent-initiated contact with teachers. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40 (3), 289-308.

Klein, M., K. Barg & M. Kühhirt (2019). Inequality of Educational Opportunity in East and West Germany: Convergence or Continued Differences?. Sociological Science, 6, 1-26.

Barg, K. (2019). Why are middle-class parents more involved in school than working-class parents?. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 59, 14-24.

Barg, K. (2015). Educational choice and cultural capital: Examining social stratification within an institutionalized dialogue between family and school, Sociology 49(6), 1113-1132.

Barg, K. (2013). The influence of students’ social background and parental involvement on teachers’ school track choices: reasons and consequences, European Sociological Review 29(3), 565-579.

Barg, K. & M. Beblo (2012). Does "sorting into specialization" explain the differences in time use between married and cohabiting couples in Germany? Annales d'Économie et de Statistique 105/106 (Annals of Economics and Statistics), 127-152.

Barg, K. & M. Beblo (2009). Does marriage pay more than cohabitation? Journal of Economic Studies 36(6), 552-570.

Barg, K. & M. Beblo (2007). The male marital wage premium in Germany: selection versus specialization, Journal of Applied Social Sciences Studies 127(1), 59-73.