Increasing inter‐generational social mobility: is educational expansion the answer?

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy‐makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility.     

An Experiment on the Measurement of Political Knowledge in Surveys

In a series of articles, Mondak and colleagues argue that theconventional way of measuring political knowledge in surveysis flawed. Personality related "propensity to guess" underestimatesthe level of political knowledge in the population and distortsestimates of between group differences, when a DK alternativeis offered. This has led Mondak to recommend the use of closed-endeditems on which DKs are not explicitly offered, following bestpractice in the field of educational testing. In this article,we present the results of an experimental study which callsinto question the wisdom of this approach. Our results showlittle evidence of partial knowledge concealed within DK responses;when people who initially select a DK alternative are subsequentlyasked to provide a "best guess," they fare statistically nobetter than chance. We conclude that opinion researchers shouldbe cautious about adopting Mondak's recommendations for thedesign of political knowledge items in surveys. Received for publication February 22, 2005. Revision received October 19, 2006. Accepted for publication October 25, 2006.     

Declining social mobility? Evidence from five linked censuses in England and Wales 1971–2011

In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter‐generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS‐LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS‐LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and low rates of nonresponse and attrition across waves. Additionally, the structure of the study means that we can observe the occupations of LS‐members' parents when they were children and follow their own progress in the labour market at regular intervals into middle age. Counter to widespread prevailing beliefs, our results show evidence of a small but significant increase in social fluidity between 1950s and the 1980s for both men and women.     

A graphical chain model for reciprocal relationships between women's gender role attitudes and labour force participation

Summary.  We use a graphical chain model to investigate the reciprocal relationships between changes in women's labour force participation following entry into parenthood and changes in gender role attitude. Results suggest that attitudes are not fixed and that revision of these attitudes in the light of recent life course events is an important process. The adaptation of attitudes to events appears to be stronger than the selection of individuals on the basis of attitudes. We show that it is not entry into parenthood as such, but the change in economic activity that is related to this event that is associated with attitude change.     

A Different Take on the Deliberative Poll: Information, Deliberation, and Attitude Constraint

Opinion pollsters, political scientists, and democratic theoristshave long been concerned with the normative and methodologicalimplications of nonattitudes (Converse 1964). Of the proposedremedies to the weak and labile attitudinal responses profferedby an uninformed and disinterested public, perhaps the mostambitious to date has been Fishkin’s concept of the deliberativepoll (Fishkin 1991, 1995, 1997). Combining probability samplingwith information intervention and increased deliberation affordsa unique insight into what might be considered the true "voiceof the people." Yet, while deliberative polling draws heavilyon the general notion of political sophistication (Luskin 1987),empirical analyses have tended to focus almost entirely on howthe process of deliberation impacts on marginal totals of attitudeitems at both the individual and aggregate level (Fishkin 1997;Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell 2002; Sturgis 2003). Little attention,in contrast, has been paid to outcomes that relate to otherdimensions of opinion quality, such as attitude constraint.Constraint refers to the level of consistency between attitudeswithin an individual belief system that arises from a combinationof logical, social, and psychological factors (Converse 1964).In this article we analyze data from five deliberative pollsconducted in the United Kingdom in the 1990s in order to investigatethe impact of political information and deliberation on attitudeconstraint. Across a broad range of issue areas we evaluatethe extent to which the deliberative process impacts on statisticalassociations among attitude items between the first and subsequentwaves of the polls. We conclude by discussing the implicationsof our results for the validity and reliability of survey measuresof the attitude and the broader utility of the deliberativepolling method as a tool of social scientific inquiry.