Shared Resources

The Educational Disadvantage Toolkit

The Educational Disadvantage Toolkit is a concise, harmonized survey instrument for measuring students’ sociodemographic background in higher economics education. Jana Sadeh, Malte Ring and Doug McKee created it to close a long-standing gap: measures of student background vary widely across countries and contexts, which makes systematic comparison difficult. EENE runs into this constantly, since our studies draw participants from many countries. These questions are now going into EENE surveys to support international comparisons across subgroups. A paper describing the toolkit is coming soon.

Our toolkit grew out of a structured review and was validated with economics educators internationally. It distills the core dimensions of inequality — gender, caregiver education, language, migration background, educational experience, minority status, work and care responsibilities, financial concerns, and physical and mental health — into ten carefully worded questions. It offers researchers a flexible, standardized baseline for comparative and multi-site studies, one that can be extended with context-specific questions while preserving cross-national comparability.

You can now download a PDF version of the toolkit questions and a draft of our paper describing the toolkit. Ready-to-use Qualtrics (.qsf) and Microsoft Forms versions of the toolkit are available on request. If you would like to use these questions in your own research, please contact Jana Sadeh.