Introducing HESSS: home economics at Swiss secondary schools

Abstract

Education policy has increasingly gained the attention of political scientists. Owing to its decentralised structure and the ensuing variation across cantons, the Swiss education system is a great place to study questions about the determinants and consequences of education policy. However, partly for the same reason, structured and detailed (historical) comparative data about curricula — who was was taught what, when, where and how — is relatively rare. We contribute to closing this gap by introducing HESSS, a novel dataset on the provision of home economics education (“Hauswirtschaft") in Switzerland in ten German-speaking cantons for vocational- and university track secondary schools since 1980 and 1991, respectively. The new dataset can help social science scholars explore variation in various aspects of home economics education over time and across cantons, and facilitate research on the Swiss educational system. In this research note, we outline the main features of the data and illustrate how it can be used in two applications: (i) tracking the switch from gender segregated to co-educated classes in response to the 1981 vote on equality for men and women; and (ii) describing the impact of cantonal education budget cuts and popular opposition to such cuts on home economics at secondary schools in the canton of Zurich.