Revising the link between neighbourhoods and education: The case of well performing middle schools in Malmö

Sammanfattning: How do neighbourhoods affect life chances? This is a question that researchers have asked in different forms as early as the 50’s –and there is no shortage of papers exploring neighbourhood effects: how where we live affects our well-being or our participation in the labour market, our life expectancy or, in general, our life outcomes. Yet, there is less consensus than one would expect from a field that has been this active: mechanisms are not clearly defined, methodologies are often one-sided, theoretical concepts are outdated and sometimes harmful for communities and contextuality of most kinds is surprisingly rare. In exploring and revising past research, this thesis proposes an interpretation of the phenomenon among others, through the lense of Bourdieu and Passeron’s reproduction of capital, and argues for a systematic perspective when trying to decipher neighbourhood effect mechanisms. To see the privileged side of neighbourhood segregation, the thesis sets out to find the combination of conditions sufficient/necessary to reach high educational outcomes in Malmö’s middle schools in 2018-2019 through the usage of the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) mixed-method and then applying a within-case analysis to zoom in on the proposed mechanisms. The role of segregation in both housing and education is underlined. The result shows two paths for the High Educational Out-comes in Malmö that suggest a need for a more systematic approach to segregation, both educational and residential. That approach should also lay an big focus on information inequalities, especially when it comes to making choices on which educational outcomes depend. Educational Success is therefore achieved in majority Swedish neighbourhoods that have high disposable income, in schools that are in all instances segregated and in most privately owned and/or have classes with highly educated parents.