IUB’s Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program brought her to campus during second summer session to teach a course combining elements of both disciplines.  Its title was H520, “Education and Social Issues,” and considered the role of schools regarding cultural transmission, social mobility, race, gender, and class, as well as their possibilities as sites of social change.  Scott noted that her eighteen graduate students were very engaged and interesting, and most found course discussions highly relevant for the secondary education careers they would pursue later on.

  Regarding her own research, Scott said “I’m very interested in educational attainment processes in society, particularly how mother’s occupation effects the child’s educational attainment.” She pointed out that, regarding status attainment models,  “traditionally, the model variables have been defined like this: the father’s education, the mother’s education, the father’s occupation, but not that of the mother.”  Because the father’s occupation inevitably impacts his educational effect on the child’s educational attainment, the absence of the mother’s career in such calculations prohibits the analysis of true direct effects.  So for her sociology master’s thesis, Scott reconfigured the traditional status attainment model to eliminate paternal career variables, focusing exclusively on parental educational background instead.

 In expanding upon this work for her dissertation, Scott decided that, given the increasing presence of mothers in the work force, she should include both parental occupational and educational variables, calculating first for direct effects stemming from career variables, and then the net effects of educational variables.  She said this project also attempted to integrate interaction effects: “I wanted to see if race plays a factor, and also looked at cohort effects.”  Her data was gathered from “National Opinion Research Center” survey responses, 1994 and 1996, and was divided into two cohorts.  “Because persons under 24 years of age may not have finished their formal schooling, I considered those between 24 and 45 as one cohort, and those between 46 and 89 as the other.”  This division allowed Scott to trace changes of mothers’ occupational influence over time, and to allow for the fact that recent cohorts tend to have higher levels of education, and parents who also received higher educational status.   Somewhat predictably, the younger men and women were more strongly influenced by maternal occupation models than those of the older group.  Surprisingly, however, Scott discovered that mother’s career had stronger influence than that of the father’s on son’s educational attainment, highlighting a new trend of cross- versus same-sex effect.