Understanding the mobility chances of children from working-class backgrounds in Britain: How important are cognitive ability and locus of control?

Research in social stratification has shown that children from working-class backgrounds tend to obtain substantially lower levels of educational attainment and lower labor market positions than children from higher social class backgrounds. However, we still know relatively little about the micro-level processes that account for this empirical regularity. Our study examines the roles of two individual-level characteristics—cognitive ability and locus of control—in mediating the effect of individuals’ parental class background on their educational attainment and social class position in Britain. We find that cognitive ability mediates only about 35% of the total parental class effect on educational attainment and only about 20% of the total parental class effect on respondents’ social class position, net of their educational attainment. These findings contradict existing claims that differences in the life chances of children from different social class backgrounds are largely due to differences in cognitive ability. Moreover, we find that although individuals’ locus of control plays some role in mediating the parental class effect, its role is substantially smaller than the mediating role of cognitive ability. We measure individuals’ social class positions at different points in their careers—at labor market entry and at occupational maturity—and find that the mediating roles of cognitive ability and locus of control are remarkably stable across individuals’ working lives.     

Par for the course: A study of gambling on the links and a commentary on physical skill‐based gambling formats

Abstract

A widely practiced but understudied gambling activity is the wagering that occurs between participants in games of physical skill. Little is known about what draws players to this form of gambling, the sub‐groups involved or their social dynamics, the strategies employed, and whether, and to what extent, this activity is associated with disordered gambling.

Gamblers were studied in their natural environment at two private golf clubs. Prominent themes emerging from the research include: motivations for gambling on golf, socialisation into golf course gambling, the golf course betting hierarchy, deceptive practices and evidence of disordered gambling. In general, the golf course wagering we investigated embraced several unique features and traditions that generally make it a salutary gambling experience, largely free of the destructive elements associated with luck‐based gambling formats. The study's findings are utilised to make observations about other gambling formats and gamblers in general.     

A menu for learning: a World Café approach for user involvement and inter-professional learning on mental health

Inter-professional learning (IPL) initiatives and service user involvement are well established in professional education programmes, but are seldom incorporated in the same teaching and learning project. In order to accomplish a combination of these approaches, an interactive learning format, styled as a World Café on mental health, was chosen to bring social work and mental health nursing students together with service users and carers. The project aimed to be participatory and inclusive from the outset, establishing a steering group with staff, students and user/carer volunteers to plan the day-long event. The event enabled all participants to engage in round table conversations to learn from each other's outlooks and roles, and for students to reflect on their future inter-professional practice and engagement with service users. Findings from this project indicate that the World Café as a teaching and learning method may have much to offer students engaged in IPL activities. We believe that the findings from this project can contribute to the advancement of existing knowledge regarding IPL and user involvement, and that a World Café approach may serve as a template for replication for other education providers, as part of a wider repertoire of inter-professional and service user involvement initiatives.     

Has social mobility in Britain decreased? Reconciling divergent findings on income and class mobility

Social mobility has become a topic of central political concern. In political and also media circles it is widely believed that in Britain today mobility is in decline. However, this belief appears to be based on a single piece of research by economists that is in fact concerned with intergenerational income mobility: specifically, with the relation between family income and children's later earnings. Research by sociologists using the same data sources – the British birth cohort studies of 1958 and 1970 – but focusing on intergenerational class mobility does not reveal a decline either in total mobility rates or in underlying relative rates. The paper investigates these divergent findings. We show that they do not result from the use of different subsets of the data or of different analytical techniques. Instead, given the more stable and generally less fluid class mobility regime, it is the high level of income mobility of the 1958 cohort, rather than the lower level of the 1970 cohort, that is chiefly in need of explanation. Further analyses – including ones of the relative influence of parental class and of family income on children's educational attainment – suggest that the economists' finding of declining mobility between the two cohorts may stem, in part at least, from the fact that the family income variable for the 1958 cohort provides a less adequate measure of ‘permanent income’ than does that for the 1970 cohort. But, in any event, it would appear that the class mobility regime more fully captures the continuity in economic advantage and disadvantage that persists across generations.     

Making it ‘APP’en: service user feedback: developing and implementing a service user APP: reflections from Northern Ireland,England and Scotland

Despite the advent of social media and increasing use of smart phone technology amongst global and UK populations, APP’s for social work remain in their infancy. Several have been developed which focus on the education of social workers and practitioners providing information on specific social work issues, and one we are aware of that explores ethics and values using a games-based approach. In this paper, we discuss the importance of service user perspective in social work practice and how this informed the development of the feedback App. We reflect on developing this instrument using digital technologies which social workers can use to gather anonymous feedback from service users about their experiences of social work interventions. This project, developed in response to demands placed on social work agencies to evidence the effectiveness of service interventions, provide robust data from service users for inspection regimes and sustain service user involvement in improving services. The evaluation model is designed to document the implementation process, exploring what works and what barriers, challenges and lessons were learned by the project team together with how some of the tensions in the process were addressed and resolved.     

The AKKA-board – performing mobility,disability and innovation

This study involves a mobility device with relevance for health and well-being for severely disabled persons. The purpose of this study is to examine some of the geographical, innovative and existential implications of the performance of place through mobility that the AKKA-board produces for severely disabled people. What does mobility and place mean in terms of supporting human skills that are being performed with the help of the AKKA-board? It is concluded that mobility in terms of a self-controlled movement is connected to enabling individual decision-making, independence and well-being.     

Occupational safety and profit maximization: Friends or foes?

The rise of the Industrial Revolution is often depicted as a cause of hazardous working conditions and is skillfully epitomized in William Blake's tale of a child chimney sweeper. Conventional wisdom puts firm profit in conflict with occupational safety. We reexamine this argument noting that injuries are very costly to firms because they lead to higher wage premiums, worker compensation, and costly work stoppages. We hypothesize that it is precisely for these reasons that firms in the industries with dangerous working conditions have the strongest incentives to innovate and substitute more capital for labor. Using a longitudinal panel of U.S. industries, we test and confirm our hypothesis that higher injury rates lead to higher capital stock per worker, over time. Moreover, our estimates suggest that firms provide more capital and equipment per worker than what would have been there based solely on the compensating wage differential.     

A single-session positive cognitive intervention on first-year students’ mental health: Short-term effectiveness and the mediating role of strengths knowledge

Abstract

Objective: To better understand the effectiveness of a single-session positive cognitive intervention and uncover the possible mechanisms. Participants: Participants were 79 first-year students (aged 17–21) who volunteered for the intervention during the 2016 fall semester. Methods: Participants were randomly assigned into the intervention group and the control group. All participants completed pretest, post-test, 1 week, and 3-month follow-up tests. Thriving, negative emotional states, strengths knowledge were assessed. Results: Results showed significant increases of thriving in the intervention group at post-test and after 1 week, and significant decreases of negative emotions at the post-test and after 1 week and 3 months. Strengths knowledge fully mediated the intervention effect on thriving at post-test. Conclusions: The single-session positive cognitive intervention could be a responsive and effective approach to promote first-year students mental health. More attention should be paid to mechanisms of the single-session positive cognitive intervention so as to optimize the effects of the single-session positive cognitive intervention.     

Climbing Jacob's ladder:Symbolic renunciation,reference‐group identification,and status mobility in cursillo

This article is a continuation of analyses of cursillo. The specific concerns addressed are the development of the appropriate linguistic skills, that is, learning how to “talk the talk “of cursillo, and the development of the appropriate behavioral skills, that is, learning how to “walk the walk” of cursillo. When these skills are developed and used appropriately a form of ranked status mobility within a cursillo center can occur.     

Neighbourhood social ties: how much do residential,physical and virtual mobility matter?

Following up on the prediction by classical sociological theorists that neighbours will become irrelevant as societies become more mobile, this research examines the strength of people's social ties with neighbours and the associations thereof with residential, physical and virtual mobility using longitudinal data for Germany. Unlike previous studies, the research considers the three forms of mobility simultaneously and contrasts its effects on social ties with neighbours to those with family. The results show that residential and physical mobility are negatively associated with social ties to neighbours and positively with ties to family. Virtual mobility does not weaken social ties with neighbours but ties with family. The positive association between mobility and social ties with family may not be strong enough to ascertain that people maintain as close social ties to others in the future as it does not outweigh the negative association with visiting neighbours.     

“Bringing the migrant back in”: mobility,conflict, and social change in contemporary society

Dominant social theories have rarely placed migration at the center of our understanding of society and social change. Classical theories in the Western tradition have been more preoccupied with the impact of economic and political revolutions on social change, stratification and class conflict, and have paid far less attention to other important aspects of society. Contemporary theories have expanded the theoretical gaze to include a much wider set of issues, from racial and gender divisions to warfare and the environment. In an era of globalization, we argue that such a marginalization of the migrant, and the failure to better integrate both internal and external migration into a more nuanced interpretation of social change, is a significant shortcoming. By examining some of the key elements linked to such human movement in Europe, North America and China -- in the light of five recent studies in this field -- we argue that migration is a vital factor in changing the world as we know it and consequently a central concern for social theory. This is a review essay on:Richard Alba and Nancy Foner. Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.Louis DeSipio and Rodolfo de la Garza. US Immigration in the Twenty-First Century: Making Americans, Remaking America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015.Adrian Favell. Immigration, Integration and Mobility: New Agendas in Migration Studies. Colchester: ECPR Press, 2015.Zhongshan Yue. Social Integration of Rural-Urban Migrants in China: Current Status, Determinants and Consequences. Singapore: World Scientific Publishers, 2015.Robyn R Iredale and Fei Guo. Handbook of Chinese Migration: Identity and Wellbeing. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.     

New cooperatives and local development: A study of six cases in Jämtland,Sweden

Over the last ten years or so a large number of new cooperative enterprises have been established in Sweden in many different areas of activity. The research project reported here concerns the effects which these enterprises have on local economic development. More precisely, attention is focused on the impact of the cooperatives on (1) local employment, (2) the local infrastructure, and (3) the geographical pattern of buying, i.e., how the new cooperatives distribute their purchases of goods and services among local, regional and national suppliers. Six cooperatives are investigated, all of which are located in Jämtland, a county in northern Sweden. The cases include two commercially operating enterprises, two whose operations belong to the public sector, one housing cooperative and one community cooperative. Five of the studied units have created local employment, varying between 2 and 10 full-time jobs. This represents a substantial contribution in the small rural villages where the cooperatives are located. As regards the local infrastructure, the research interest is concentrated on the significance of the new enterprises in preserving the school, the shop and the communications of the village. Here the impact is effected in two ways; (1) by creating jobs and income, thereby strengthening the population base for the service institutions, and (2) by influencing municipal decision-makers. As for the pattern of buying, very small shares — between 0 and 17% — go to local suppliers. Instead, the effects appear at the regional level, with between 38 and 100% of the purchases being made from suppliers in the rest of the county.     

‘La Lenin is my passport’: schooling,mobility and belonging in socialist Cuba and its diaspora

Based on an ethnographic study of transnational networks of alumni of an academically selective boarding school in Havana, this article explores the nexus between mobility, schooling and belonging in the context of socialist Cuba and its diaspora. Drawing on Goffman’s work, I argue that the boarding school experience was transformative; it facilitated or consolidated social mobility for its pupils, which later, for many, led to geographic mobility in the form of study and work outside Cuba. After graduating, alumni continue to identify with the school and to reproduce their alumni identities. The affective webs of belonging forged through family links and friendships fostered at the school constitute emotionally sustaining networks that also provide material support after migrating. I propose that the school represents a site of identification for a globally dispersed non-national diaspora and argue that migration scholars need to embed international migration within people’s lives more broadly.