Multigenerational Social Mobility

• In Event: 4450 - Topics in Sociological Methodology, Session 2

Abstract

Most social mobility studies have taken a two-generation perspective, in which intergenerational relationship is represented by the association between parents’ and offspring’s socioeconomic status. This approach, albeit widely acknowledged and adopted in the literature, has limited values when more than two generations of families are considered. In particular, it ignores the role of families’ demographic behaviors in moderating mobility outcomes and the joint effects of mobility and demography in shaping long-run family and population processes. This paper provides a demographic approach to the study of multigenerational social mobility, incorporating demographic mechanisms of births, deaths, and mating into statistical models of social mobility. Compared to previous mobility models that estimate the mobility probability of offspring conditional on parent’s social class, the proposed joint demographic and mobility model treats the number of offspring in various social classes as the outcome of interest. This new approach shows the extent to which demographic processes may amplify or dampen the effects of family socioeconomic positions because of the direction and strength of the interaction between mobility and differentials in demographic outcomes. In this paper, a variety of demographic methods for studying multigenerational mobility are illustrated with empirical examples using the IPUMS linked historical U.S. census representative samples (1850-1930) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968-2015), and with simulation data that show other possible scenarios of demography-mobility interactions.

Author

• Xi Song, University of Pennsylvania