Adolescents’ Perceptions of Social Mobility in Relation to Their Career Aspirations: First Insights from Nepal

• In Event: Youth’s Conceptions of Prejudice and Inequality Across Contexts: Evidence from Asia, Europe, and North America

Abstract

Social mobility is crucial, given the rising social and economic inequalities worldwide. Yet, little is known regarding how adolescents evaluate their possibilities for upward or downward mobility (Mistry et al., 2015), particularly in low-resource contexts. The current study examines adolescents’ understanding of social mobility in Nepal, a country with a long history of social hierarchies and inequalities. We longitudinally investigated adolescents’ perceived social mobility in society with vignettes of low and high SES story characters and their possibility to achieve low versus high prestige jobs. In addition, we examined adolescents’ own perceived mobility with a focus on their career aspirations. The limited cross-sectional research shows that, with age, adolescents are increasingly likely to give up a desired career aspirations (Kim & Gewirtz, 2019), potentially due to increasing understanding and reasoning about social inequalities, which includes a more complex understanding of structural barriers underlying these inequalities (Arsenio & Williams, 2017; Flanagan et al., 2014). We therefore focused on longitudinal associations between adolescents’ own and societal mobility and examined the role of adolescents’ SES, academic efficacy beliefs and perceived societal inequality in the development of their perceptions of social mobility.

At four time points spanning four years of development, 570 Nepalese adolescents from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds (M = 14.25, SD = 1.35) in grades 7-10 were interviewed face-to-face about their own career aspirations (categorized according to the ISIC occupation coding tool by the United Nations), the likelihood of achieving their career aspiration, their perceived self-efficacy in school (Midgley et al., 1996), and their perception of social inequality (Diemer et al., 2014). We examined adolescents’ perceived social mobility in society by asking them how likely it was that a hypothetical peer from a high or low SES background would get a job with high or low prestige. Difference scores were created with high values indicating low mobility: 1) a higher likelihood for the high SES peer to get a high prestigious job rather than a low prestigious job and 2) a higher likelihood for the low SES peer to get a low prestigious job rather than a high prestigious job. Adolescents’ own SES was estimated based on estimated per capita consumption.

Preliminary results showed that, at all four time points, the majority of adolescents (T1: 72%, T2: 69%, T3: 73%, and T4: 78%) reported aspiring a high prestigious career (managers or professionals) and were optimistic about achieving their career aspiration. This optimism increased slightly over time and was positively associated with perceived self-efficacy in school, but not with perceived inequality (Figure 1). Adolescents perceived low social mobility: they increasingly expected high SES characters to achieve high SES jobs while they became more optimistic regarding the low SES character. Differences emerged with regards to adolescents’ own SES (Figure 2) and adolescents perceiving higher inequality were less optimistic regarding social mobility, while there was no effect for academic self-efficacy. Interestingly, both concepts of social mobility were not related to each other over time. Specific follow-up analyses will be conducted using a latent approach.

Authors

• Carmen Barth, University of Konstanz
  Presenting Author

• Jeanine Grütter, University of Konstanz