Educational inequality, a feature of modern societies, is the topic of this diploma thesis. Until now, the investigation of inequality in education has above all shown especially differences between social groups; however, in this thesis it will be demonstrated, that there are also educational- success inequalities within one and the same social group. Thus, children from socioeconomically underprivileged families with migration background in Vienna are focused on. The aim of this thesis is to

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... dentify factors and mechanisms that significantly influence the educa-tional success of our sample's children at the transition from elementary school to secondary education. The differences and similarities within this group will be discussed in detail. The qualitative analysis comprises 17 children, the data having been collected by interviewing parents, children and headmasters, to name just the core data sources. The results of the analysis show that the institutional ascription of educational success can not only be attributed to social background or ethnicity; rather, there are also differences within one and the same group. Our data shows that educa-tional success is also influenced by the school experience of the children's moth-ers, by the parents' self confidence and the courage to ask in case of a lack of knowledge, as well as by the teachers' presuppositions up to prejudices. In addi-tion, parental language skills and language transmission in the family, as well as successful older siblings and the parents' engagement make a considerable differ-ence for their children's educational success.