The Choice of Educational Trajectory by School Children: Application of Interaction Detection Methods

The main idea of this research is to apply the method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to find combinations of various individual and school characteristics of schoolchildren, which lead to the choice in favor of studying in secondary vocational schools and institutions of general secondary education after 9th grade of school. The relevance of the study is explained by the newness of used method, the need to study educational inequality in the context of educational transitions and the key value for the labor market in choosing an educational path after the 9th grade. The paper consistently examines theoretical concepts related to the choice of educational trajectory and the factors influencing it. The methodological part of the work reveals the features of the applied method of qualitative comparison, and points out its differences from the traditional statistical methods used in studies of educational choice. The selection of variables for analysis is carried out on the basis of the categories of factors highlighted in the literature review, the requirements of the method used in the work, and questions from the database used for the analysis. The study is based on the longitudinal study “Trajectories in education and professions” of the Institute of Education of the HSE, which has been conducted since 2011. The analytical part of the work consists of the construction of fifteen different models of qualitative comparative analysis, their description and evaluation. The application of the method of qualitative comparative analysis to search for combinations of characteristics that lead to the choice of a particular trajectory of education was not successful in this study. However, meaningful application of qualitative comparative analysis allows us to give new information that is impossible to obtain using traditional statistical methods of studying the choice of educational trajectory. In conclusion, a qualitative assessment of combinations of various characteristics of schoolchildren was successfully carried out in cases where such combinations were not statistically considered as sufficient. The study examined in detail the procedure for conducting a qualitative comparative analysis and showed how it combines the features of quantitative and qualitative approaches in social research.