Meritocracy remains one of the most powerful organising ideas in education systems worldwide, shaping how students interpret selection, reward, and failure. But even though meritocratic ideology is often theorised at a global level, far less attention has been paid to how students construct merit under conditions of deep structural inequality. This paper presents the validation of a new construct, Meritorious Transition Belief (MTB), designed to measure students’ belief in merit-based school selection within a highly stratified education system in the Global South. Drawing on data from Ghana, the study adopts Rasch Measurement Theory within a two-phase design involving a pilot study and a large-scale dataset. Unlike existing approaches that operationalise meritocratic belief purely as cognitive endorsement of merit ideals, MTB integrates cognitive beliefs about deservingness with affective attachment to school placement outcomes. Rasch analyses demonstrate strong measurement properties, including satisfactory item fit, stable item hierarchy, and effective person–item targeting. Dimensionality analyses indicate a bifactorial structure as a higher-order construct. Differential Item Functioning analyses show that the scale functions largely invariantly across school types, while also revealing that items legitimising or contesting stratification are sensitive to students’ positional advantage within the system. Further analysis shows that under conditions of deep inequality; the most common expression of merit belief is scepticism (67.65%). Smaller groups of affirmers, adaptives, and resisters emerge, with resisters concentrated among students in low-resourced schools. Overall, the MTB scale provides a psychometrically robust tool for examining how belief in merit is formed, negotiated, and contested within unequal schooling systems.

Authors:
Nick Quartey, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Nick Quartey is a PhD (in Education) candidate at the University of Manchester UK. He's a social policy innovator, focusing on educational inequality, social justice, school transition dynamics, and socio-economic disparities in the Global South.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-minell-quartey-19a9ab12b

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick-Quartey

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