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.
