By using a recent, large-scale, and nationally representative data set, this study aims to explore the factors associated with school participation at both the primary and secondary levels in Turkey, with specific attention to the community-level factors. The school participation of children at both levels has been a prominent problem in Turkey, similar to many other developing countries. Therefore, numerous studies have been conducted to determine the factors associated with the school participation of boys and girls so far. Existing studies in Turkey, however, have extensively focused on the association between household-level factors and school participation, ignoring the role of the broader environment in which children live. This study, therefore, makes an important contribution to the current school participation literature in Turkey by taking socio-economic context variables into account with the multilevel modeling method. The findings highlight the importance of community/context factors in explaining school participation in Turkey. The results of the study can help policymakers develop a systematic understanding of the relationship between socio-economic context and school participation, and make more appropriate decisions for improving school participation across the country.With respect to the household level factors, the results are in line with the previous literature on the relationship between household-level factors and the school participation of children in Turkey. I find that the mother's ability to speak Turkish and the household head's education are positively associated with school participation, while being female, being older, mothers' traditional gender role attitudes, household poverty, and residing in a large household are negatively associated with school participation. The results of the multilevel analyses, which are the key contribution of this study, show that the school participation of children in Turkey significantly varies between communities, but only for children aged 14-17. Specific community-level variables such as average adult education and the average gender role attitudes in the community, which I use as a proxy for social context, are found to be significantly associated with school participation, while economic variables, such as community poverty and urbanization, are not significantly associated with school participation. These results also mostly align with the results of existing studies in other developing countries and confirm the importance of social context in which children live for their educational involvement.
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