Mobilising Compensatory Cultural Capital: Gendered Agency and Educational Reproduction in Türkiye

Abstract

In settings marked by persistent educational inequality, less is known about how families describe supporting children’s schooling when resources are constrained. This qualitative study examines how parents in Türkiye mobilise cultural resources under competitive schooling conditions and introduces compensatory cultural capital, defined as the strategic use of affective, relational, and organisational practices to sustain children’s engagement. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 parents in a mid-sized Central Anatolian city, sampled for socioeconomic diversity, and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Parents portrayed education-related spending and supplementary provision as attempts to keep pace with curricular demands and high-stakes progression pressures, while emphasising the limits of what households could sustain over time. School contact was narrated as strategic communication and follow-up that often intensified during exam-focused periods to access timely information and guidance. Within households, educational labour was frequently organised as routine maternal responsibility, and parents’ self-assessed competence and “insufficiency” were commonly linked to educational background and familiarity with schoolwork. Alongside material constraints, parents described non-material forms of support such as regulating homework through time and attention, offering future-oriented guidance, and sustaining sociocultural routines valued for confidence, well-being, and learning dispositions. Overall, the findings show how families navigate inequality through everyday forms of support whose value is not captured by expenditure alone, and how this work is unevenly distributed within families. By foregrounding parents’ meaning-making and practice, the study refines sociological accounts of educational reproduction by making visible compensatory cultural capital as a practical repertoire in constrained circumstances.