VET or general education? Effects of regional opportunity structures on educational attainment in German-speaking Switzerland

Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training

Table 1 Results of the principal-component factor analysis

Indicators of regional opportunity structures	Factor loadings	Unique-ness	Average item-rest correlation	\(\alpha \) without item i
Youth ratio, 2000^a	−0.856	0.267	0.813	0.929
Change in youth ratio between 2000 and 2010^b	0.826	0.318	0.777	0.931
Overall unemployment rate, 2013^c	0.738	0.456	0.671	0.936
Prop. of persons entitled to enroll at university on all upper secondary qualifications, 2013^d	0.762	0.419	0.707	0.935
Prop. of apprentices among all employees and apprentices, 2012^e	−0.839	0.295	0.793	0.930
Total workplaces in the second sector, 2013^f	0.733	0.462	0.667	0.936
Total workplaces in the third sector, 2013^g	0.869	0.245	0.834	0.928
Prop. of workplaces in the second sector, 2013^h	−0.673	0.547	0.605	0.939
Prop. of workplaces in the third sector, 2013ⁱ	0.884	0.218	0.849	0.928
Prop. of new jobs created in new firms between 2001–2012 among all new jobs in new firms^j	0.846	0.285	0.803	0.930
Eigenvalue			6.488
Proportion of variance accounted for by factor			0.649
Average interitem correlation			0.605
Number of items in the scale			10
Cronbach’s \(\alpha \) (standardized items)			0.939

^aSource: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 16, aggregated community level data based on Federal Population Census data
^bSource: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 15971, aggregated community level data based on Federal Population Census data and Population and Households Statistics (STATPOP)
^cSource: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 17738, MS-regional level data based on Structural survey and Unemployment Statistics (SECO)
^dSource: Structural survey; requested at FSO
^eSource: MS-regional level data based on Statistik der Unternehmensstruktur (STATENT) and Statistik der beruflichen Grundbildung (SBG), requested at FSO
^fSource: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 18182, aggregated community level data based on Statistik der Unternehmensstruktur (STATENT)
^gSource: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 18185, aggregated community level data based on Statistik der Unternehmensstruktur (STATENT)
^{h, i}Source: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 18182, 18185, aggregated community level data based on Statistik der Unternehmensstruktur (STATENT)
^jSource: Statatlas Switzerland, FSO; map-id: 17735, MS-regional level data based on Business Census (BC) and Statistik der Unternehmensdemografie (UDEMO)