An application of diagonal reference models and time-varying covariates in social mobility research on mortality and fertility

In social mobility research, the diagonal reference model (DRM) is argued to best isolate the effect of social mobility from origin and destination status effects. In demographic research, standard analyses of the duration until an event occurs rely heavily on the appropriate use of covariates that change over time. We apply these best-practice methods to the study of social mobility and demographic outcomes in Sweden using register data that covers the years 1996–2012. The mortality analysis includes 1,024,142 women and 747,532 men and the fertility analysis includes 191,142 women and 164,368 men. We identify the challenges inherent in this combination and present strategies with an application to how social mobility is related to both fertility and mortality. Our application is successful at incorporating all requirements related to these methods. Our findings suggest, however, that certain data characteristics, such as a relatively high share of missing data, can be problematic. We also find that controlling for origin and destination status generally provides acceptable estimates of the mobility association in the specific case of Sweden and the relationship between social mobility and both fertility and mortality.     

Intergenerational social mobility and religious ecology: Disaggregating the conservative Protestant bloc

We extend research on the effects of religious ecologies by examining the role of religious ecologies in intergenerational socioeconomic mobility. We do so first by providing a theoretical framework addressing the diverse cultural influences of religious traditions and their impact on intergenerational mobility. We argue that certain otherworldly orientations among conservative Protestants suppress mechanisms of upward mobility, and that there are meaningful distinctions between sub-groups of conservative Protestants (evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals). An analysis of county-level data from the recently released Equality of Opportunity Project and the Churches and Church Membership Survey is used to empirically examine the relationship between religious ecologies and intergenerational mobility. Findings suggest distinct effects of different religious groups on intergenerational mobility. These results demonstrate the importance of accounting for the ecological impact of religion on social mobility in the United States and challenge the conceptualization of conservative Protestants as a monolithic group.     

Models of social mobility

Properties of measures and models of social mobility are analyzed in relation to the conceptualization of mobility. Two main objectives of mobility research are identified. One is the study of determinants of occupational achievement, the other is the study of mobility as a characteristic of social systems. It is shown that the realization of both objectives is hindered by a failure of commonly used models and measures of mobility to separate out the various individual and structural factors responsible for mobility.     

Things are looking up: Physical beauty,social mobility,and optimistic dispositions

Physical attractiveness tends to inspire friendlier reactions and more positive evaluations from others, so that the beautiful are likelier to succeed across many kinds of endeavors. Does this history of success lead to a more optimistic, hopeful attitude? Evidence from the 2016 General Social Survey and the 1972 National Election Study suggests that it often does: those whom interviewers rate as better-looking tend to report higher expectations that life will turn out well for them, and show signs of greater upward social mobility. Since optimism is itself an important contributor to success in many social endeavors, these findings suggest an understudied mechanism by which beauty leads to better life outcomes, as well as a means by which social interactions may shape personal dispositions.     

The psychological impact of intragenerational social class mobility

This study revisits and extends a classic question in sociology and tests three competing hypotheses about the effects of intragenerational social class mobility on distress and psychological well-being at midlife. Prior research on this topic investigated the effects of intergenerational mobility, but did not look at how mobility during adulthood (intragenerational mobility) affects psychological distress and well-being. Previous literature is also limited by methodological problems that make it difficult to estimate the separate effects of prior social class, current social class, and social mobility. This study overcomes this methodological problem using a novel approach that breaks the linear dependence between prior class, current class, and intragenerational mobility. After accounting for prior and current class, I find that social mobility is not associated with psychological distress and self-acceptance. Instead, mobile individuals come to resemble their nonmobile counterparts in their current class on the outcomes of study.     

Reconsidering residential mobility: Differential effects on child wellbeing by race and ethnicity

Residential mobility is a common experience among Americans, especially children. Most previous research finds residential mobility has negative effects on children's educational attainment, delinquency, substance abuse, and physical and mental health. Previous research, however, does not fully explore whether the effect of mobility differs by child race/ethnicity, in part because many of the samples used for these studies were majority white or exclusively non-white or disadvantaged. In addition, previous research rarely fully accounts for factors that predict selection into mobility and that may also be related to the outcome of interest. This study simultaneously addresses both of these limitations by estimating the effect of moving homes on children's emotional and behavioral wellbeing using first difference models and a diverse longitudinal sample from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. I find that, after controlling for a wide range of individual, caregiver, household and neighborhood characteristics, the effects of moving among African American and Latino children are significantly worse than among white children.     

Race,ageism and the slide from privileged occupations

The sociological literature on workplace inequality has been relatively clear regarding racial disparities and ongoing vulnerabilities to contemporary structural and employer biases. We still know little, however, about the consequences of age and ageism for minority workers and susceptibilities to downward mobility. Coupling insights regarding race with recent work on employment-based age discrimination, we interrogate in this article African Americans and Whites, aged 55 and older, and the extent to which they experience job loss across time. Our analyses, beyond controlling for key background attributes, distinguish and disaggregate patterns for higher and lower level status managers and professionals and for men and women. Results, derived from data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, reveal unique and significant inequalities. Relative to their White and gender specific counterparts, older African American men and women experience notably higher rates of downward mobility—downward mobility that is not explained by conventional explanations (i.e., human capital credentials, job/labor market characteristics, etc.). Such inequalities are especially pronounced among men and for those initially occupying higher status white-collar managerial and professional jobs compared to technical/skilled professional and blue-collar “first line” supervisors. We tie our results to contemporary concerns regarding ageism in the workplace as well as minority vulnerability. We also suggest an ageism-centered corrective to existing race and labor market scholarship.     

Measuring short-term labor force mobility with the Labor Utilization Framework

Continuing employment growth and declining unemployment rates in the U.S. labor force since 1982 have raised new questions about employment quality and shifts between adequate and marginal employment. In this paper, we use an individual-matched file from the 1986 and 1987 March annual demographic supplements of the Current Population Survey to examine 1-year transitions between labor force states measured with the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF). Short-term shifts between nonparticipation, unemployment, underemployment, and adequate employment—as conceived in the LUF—are characterized here for the first time. Our results suggest that the majority of recent job takers found adequate employment, but that new labor force entrants and the previously unemployed nevertheless experienced rates of involuntary part-time and low-wage employment exceeding rates for the labor force as a whole. Association models reveal wideranging differences in patterns of mobility and immobility across labor force positions. We find that upward transitions are largely counterbalanced by downward transitions, essentially yielding a one-to-one exchange of workers between specific pairs of labor force states. The analysis also indicates similarity across sex and race groups in patterns of mobility and only small differences in immobility. Mobility and immobility largely serve to reproduce from year-to-year existing sex and race inequalities in the labor force.     

Childhood poverty dynamics and adulthood overweight/obesity: Unpacking the black box of childhood

Integrating several life course models, this study examines how childhood poverty dynamics shape the risk of adulthood overweight/obesity. Growth mixture models of yearly poverty data from age 0–16 from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics identify four childhood poverty trajectories: chronic poverty, early childhood poverty, downward mobility, and poverty-free. Chronic poverty and early childhood poverty groups have higher risk of adulthood overweight/obesity than the poverty-free group. Overweight/obesity risk is not significantly different between the chronic poverty group and the early childhood poverty group, suggesting that the effects of early childhood exposure persist despite subsequent upward mobility. Downward mobility in the absence of early childhood poverty does not significantly increase adulthood obesity risk, providing further evidence that early childhood is a critical period for developing risk of overweight and obesity. These findings shed new light on the timing model, social mobility model, cumulative model, and cumulative inequality theory.     

从职业流动看失业与再就业问题

从职业流动视角来看,失业具有无流动性、下向流动性和被迫性;失业阻滞在于职业流动的规模不大,制度约束性太强和观念滞后;再就业具有上向流动性和主动性;再就业机制是一个由经济驱动机制、制度改革机制、就业观念转变机制和劳动力自由流动机制构成的综合性、动态性结构体系。     

Intergenerational and career mobility in Britain: An integrated analysis

Mobility analysis has traditionally concentrated on the task of charting flows in the two-way contingency table which relates occupational origin to occupational destination. It has not yet undertaken a unified analysis of intergenerational and intragenerational aspects of mobility. And only rarely does it incorporate terms which represent ordered concepts such as inequality or vertical movement. In contrast, path analysis has typically imposed strong orderings on the data, and it has been employed to tease out the relations among several occupational variables. Its main defect is that it entirely abstracts from shifts in mean occupational position, and also from change in the shape of the occupational distribution. Yet both of these are important sources of mobility. The present paper shows how two innovations in mobility analysis may be generalized to constitute a technique which unites the strengths of path analysis with those of log-linear analysis. The two innovations are (a) the conceptual disaggregation of perfect and exchange mobility, and (b) the imposition of an ordered component within each (K. Hope, 1981, Sociology 15, 19–55). The outcome of this generalization is a simple yet powerful account of mobility in Britain.     

The myth of the glass ceiling: Evidence from a stock-flow analysis of authority attainment

It is apparent to even a casual observer of American society that women and minorities are underrepresented among managers, especially among top-level executives. Past studies, however, have failed to find a consistent pattern of female and minority disadvantages in actual promotions and hiring decisions to account for this underrepresentation. This study aims to resolve this incongruity. Drawing on panel data from a nationally representative sample of scientists and engineers, I analyzed transitions across authority levels for men and women of three broad racial groups: whites, Asian Americans, and underrepresented minorities. There are two main findings. First, downward mobility plays an important role in authority inequality, especially for Asian men and underrepresented minority men and women. Second, while women and minorities face lower rates of upward mobility than white men, their disadvantages are concentrated in the bottom to middle-level transitions. This pattern is inconsistent with the popular notion of a “glass ceiling,” which implies that women and minorities encounter an unbreakable obstacle in accessing top positions after they have made their way into mid-level management.     

Structure and process in occupational mobility

The distinction between structure and process in occupational mobility has been a dominant theme in contemporary research. While successive attempts to “solve” the structure/process dilemma have typically focused on new methodological procedures, we emphasize the conceptual issues underlying the distinction as a basis for further analysis. We introduce a simple two-stage model for the specification of mobility structure and process and use this model to evaluate current methodological “solutions” to the analysis of mobility.     

Race, social class, and student engagement in middle school English classrooms

Student level data on participation in classroom discourse and student effort on assignments in 117 middle school English classrooms are used to investigate the social determinants of student engagement in classroom instruction. Social identity theories of race, social class, and attachment to school, and research in the social psychology of achievement motivation both suggest differential levels of student engagement among diverse student groups. Using multilevel models, the author investigates the relationship between classroom context and students’ levels of engagement. Levels of engagement among black and low SES students are mostly insensitive to classroom context, suggesting there is little collective action directed at fostering anti-school norms among these student groups. However, consistent with research in the social psychology of achievement motivation, students who begin class with weaker reading and writing skills are less likely to be engaged, setting the stage for a cycle of reduced achievement growth.     

社会公正视角下的阶层流动模型分析

中国社会呈现多元结构的特点,阶层具有结构性、阶级具有层级性,而学界往往忽视对于阶层与阶级概念的区分。改革开放后,中国的阶层流动频繁、社会分化迅速,阶层发展呈现出多元的跨界流动模型。本文通过选取公正原则,结合阶层固化的三种主导因素,推导出现代社会的几种阶层流动模型,并进行比较分析。     

Career mobility and job flocking

Flocking is oftentimes used to metaphorically describe social behavior. Do people actually flock in a way that avian species do? This paper develops a purely ecological mechanism for explaining similarity in human behavior by distinguishing between social networks of person-to-person ties and ecological networks of ties of observability. I test the “information center hypothesis” [Ibis 115 (1973) 517] from bioecology on the career mobility of professional managers who all graduated from the same university. In this case, spatial proximity in birds is replaced with sociodemographic homophily on an acquired status characteristic among persons. The results indicate that homophilous individuals exchange information about a favorable destination state by ecological ties of observability, that is, they follow the career mobility of fellow alumni and “flock” along with them.     

Men’s mobility into management from blue collar and white collar jobs: Race differences across the early work-career

Within the context of the “particularistic mobility thesis” we examine racial differences in the incidence, and determinants of, as well as timing to, mobility into management across the critical early career years at a refined level, namely, when groups share similar white collar and blue collar jobs. Findings from a Panel Study of Income Dynamics sample of men support theory and indicate that from both job levels a racial hierarchy exists: African Americans have the lowest rate of mobility, reach management through a route that is relatively formal and structured by a traditional range of stratification-based causal factors and take longest to reach management. Whites, in contrast, have the highest mobility rate, reach management through a relatively informal path that is less structured by traditional stratification-based factors, and reach management the quickest, and, across all three issues Latinos occupy an intermediate ground between African Americans and Latinos. Further, as predicted by theory, racial differences, particularly, relative to whites, are greater among those tracked from blue collar jobs than white collar jobs. Discussed are implications of the findings for understanding racial disadvantage in the American labor market across the work-career and on an inter-generational basis.     

转型期中国工农利益保障的制度选择

社会转型时期资源占有极度匮乏的工农阶层利益受损,地位下降。现有工农利益保障制度的缺失使工农阶层利益被剥夺的情形加剧。本文认为现阶段有效保护工农弱势阶层的利益,主要应该作好两方面的基本制度建设:一方面建立城乡统筹的社会保障制度体系,保障工农阶层的基本生活权利,避免工农阶层状况继续恶化;另一方面用制度规范利益表达,实现工农阶层的合理利益诉求,整合各阶层利益关系,并最终实现社会各阶层利益均衡状态下的制度均衡。     

Problems of concept and measurement in the comparative study of occupational mobility

This paper argues that, despite a great deal of research on the topic, we have almost no firm knowledge about societal differences in the rates, patterns, and processes of occupational mobility. Insufficient attention has been paid by previous researchers to the problem of standardizing the measurement of occupational status. As a result, the paper demonstrates, existing cross-national comparisons of mobility are virtually invalid. A Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale developed by the author is proposed as a basis for valid cross-national comparison. Properties of the scale are discussed and results achieved with the scale are compared to those based on other occupational scaling procedures.