Research in Social Stratification and Mobility最新文献

Evidence shows strong associations in wealth across generations, yet the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Some studies attribute these associations to direct financial transfers between generations, while others suggest more indirect mechanisms such as the impact of parental wealth on children’s earnings, family formation, or saving and investment behaviour. Factors such as residential homophily and house value appreciation may also play a role. This study examines the extent to which these mechanisms explain intergenerational associations in home ownership and home value in the UK. Using 30 years of high-quality panel survey data, we link 1341 parent-child pairs, track children’s sources of wealth accumulation in early adulthood, and assess their home ownership and value outcomes at mid-life (around age 35). We employ mediation analysis to determine the relative importance of different transmission mechanisms. Our findings reveal significant age-adjusted correlations in home ownership (0.27) and home value (0.40) between parents and their adult children. These correlations are mainly explained by children’s accumulated earnings, savings and investment income, while parental financial transfers and children’s family lives play limited roles. A substantial part of the correlations in home values are also explained by parental characteristics other than their housing wealth, particularly their place of residence. Future research should pay more attention to the role of place and the influence that parental housing wealth has on the earnings and financial behaviour of young adults.

Measures of objective and subjective social status are commonly used in social stratification research. While objective measures have been extensively examined for cross-national comparability, subjective indicators have received less attention. This study aims to address this research gap by investigating the measurement invariance of the three most commonly used single-item measures of subjective social status across many countries. Using a Bayesian approximation approach, we analysed data from three waves of the International Social Survey Programme conducted between 1999 and 2019. The analyses showed that our composite measure is a relatively reliable and stable construct when compared internationally. However, some single-item measures were not invariant across countries or survey rounds, suggesting that the average of a given single measure of subjective status or the relationship between it and other variables should not be compared across countries. Finally, the study showed that a subjective status item with a 10-step numerical ladder seems to be more appropriate for cross-country comparisons, showing low variation across countries. To improve the validity of future research, we recommend that at least three questions measuring subjective social status be included in international questionnaires and that subjective status be used as a latent construct whenever possible and appropriate.

We unite two interrelated bodies of work – a growing literature on sexual orientation earnings gaps and a rich tradition of research on intragenerational career trajectories – to examine how labor markets and life courses interact to produce gender and sexual orientation inequalities over time. We use the 1982–2019 Canadian Longitudinal Administrative Databank, a unique longitudinal database constructed from tax records, to answer core questions about the mechanisms that underlie sexual orientation earnings inequality. Growth curve models reveal how sexual orientation earnings gaps evolve over time spent in the workforce, and how they relate to differences in demographic and work characteristics for those in same- and different-sex couples at various points in the life course. We find that sexual orientation earnings gaps converge and diverge at unique career stages for men and women, and at each stage relate to unique mechanisms, especially work characteristics and family status. We find little significant variation in average earnings trajectories by sexual orientation across cohorts who were subject to differing legal and social environments surrounding sexual orientation.

Most individual-level outcomes of interest to sociologists are indirectly influenced by genetics, including socioeconomic outcomes like education, income, wealth, and occupational status. Despite this knowledge, an integration of sociological theories of class and status with the research literature on genetic heritability is largely lacking, and no previous studies have investigated the role of genetics specifically for class attainment – a central concept in sociology. To amend this, we estimate how much variation in such positions can be attributed to genetic and environmental factors in roughly 5000 Norwegian twin pairs. The results suggest that the variability in class and status attainment is influenced by genetics to a non-negligible degree, while shared environmental factors play a modest role as well. This is in line with previous findings using genetically informed designs to study other socioeconomic outcomes. Our study suggests that in addition to social environments, variation in class and status attainment can partly be explained by genetics.

The norm in which wives usually undertake a greater share of household labor than their husbands in China is deeply rooted in the fact that historically, women were of a much lower educational, social, and economic status than men. One significant change in recent decades is that the rapid improvement in women’s educational attainment has increased the share of marriages in which the wife has more education than the husband. Does the division of household labor vary among couples of diverse education pairings? How does living with parents – a common living arrangement in China – weaken or strengthen this traditional norm? We explore these questions using data from the China Family Panel Studies conducted in the 2010s. Focusing on recently married couples with young children, we show that homogamous couples in which both spouses have high school or college education and hypogamous couples in which the wife has the educational advantage have the most equitable division of household labor. Co-residence with parents does not alleviate the gender gap for most couples, but living with paternal parents tends to reduce the housework for lower educated daughters-in-law while living with maternal parents appears to benefit daughters who have one-level education more than their husbands. This study reveals reduced gender inequality in housework among the homogamous and hypogamous couples, but gender division remains strong overall, despite improvement in women’s educational attainment and potential support from paternal or maternal parents through co-residences.

Building on calls to integrate disability as an axis of stratification within sociological research, particularly within intersectional analyses of inequality, this study documents the scope of socioeconomic inequities at the intersection of multiple, entwined systems of stratification. Using data from the 2008–2019 American Community Survey (n = 19,506,716), I provide evidence of inequalities in poverty and unemployment at the intersection of disability, gender, race-ethnicity, and age. Findings highlight how disabled Black and AIAN men and women across age groups experience significantly heightened socioeconomic disadvantage. Study findings provide essential context for understanding how multiple, interlocking systems of inequality work together to produce and maintain intersectional inequalities in socioeconomic well-being. By examining the scope of socioeconomic inequities at the intersection of disability, gender, race-ethnicity, and age, this study uncovers patterns of relational inequalities that can be translated into policies and structural changes to transform power relations and promote disability and economic justice.

We examined the role of parental educational, cultural, and economic capital in differences between first-generation students’ (FGS) and continuous-generation students’ (CGS) educational outcomes: enrollment in a selective university, university performance, the probability of dropout, and the probability of pursuing a master’s or PhD program. We analyzed data from nine waves of a cohort of 5000 Russian students surveyed yearly from 2012 to 2020. We applied structural equation modeling that allowed to conduct a multiple multivariate regression analysis and to correct for measurement error. We found that FGS are 10.8 percentage points less likely to choose a selective university and are 10.7 percentage points less likely to choose to follow a graduate program. But they do not differ from CGS in university performance and the likelihood of dropout. FGS are clearly positively selected on capitals and performance, but they still have on average less parental capital and worse school performance than CGS. Parental educational and cultural capitals partly explain the differences in educational outcomes between FGS and CGS, because they improve school and university performance. Cultural capital is an especially important mediator for choosing a selective university, while educational capital is important for the other three educational outcomes. Parental economic capital plays no role in explaining educational differences between FGS and CGS. Generally, FGS and CGS benefit equally from parental capital, except FGS profiting less from parental educational capital when entering a graduate program.

Social stratification research increasingly draws attention to the role of workplaces for the (re)production of categorical inequalities. This article studies the relationship between differences between men’s and women’s chances of having a position of workplace authority – the gender authority gap – and the demographic characteristics of the organization they work in. Using unique linked employer-employee data representative of large workplaces in the Netherlands and individuals working in these organizations, I document larger gender authority gaps in organizations with larger shares of men and organizations where men have higher status than women in terms of other categorical distinctions, for example where their percentage of non-migrants is higher relative to women’s. Crucially, these findings are net of women’s and men’s individual status characteristics and human capital and related organizational characteristics. This article contributes to the literature on the gender authority gap by showing that women may be unable to reach desired jobs partially because of working in an organization with a particular demographic composition or intersection of status distinctions even when they have the qualifications to do so. In addition, the study contributes to the emerging relational inequalities literature that has thus far focused on earnings inequality by showing that predictions from this literature are consistent with the unequal distribution of desirable jobs.

Despite the steady increase in women’s labor force participation, there are still substantial cross-country variations in women’s rates of gainful employment and gender-linked occupational inequality. Utilizing micro-data for 41 countries (circa 2013) obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2023), we examine the extent to which globalization and each of its three components – economic, social, and political – affect gender-based economic inequality. Specifically, we investigate the effects of globalization and each of its components on two outcomes: the relative odds of women’s labor force participation, and of their obtaining lucrative managerial and professional jobs (vertical segregation). The findings establish a positive relationship between globalization and the relative odds of women participating in the work force. However, there is also a negative relationship between globalization and women’s odds of obtaining lucrative managerial and professional jobs. The findings also indicate that social globalization is more consequential for gender inequality in the labor market than either economic or political globalization. We discuss the findings in light of theory and previous research on globalization and gender-based inequality.

This paper investigates social stratification in the context of poor air quality's impact on educational achievement in Italy, a country characterized by high levels of air pollution and significant geographical diversity. We address two primary questions: firstly, whether students from different socio-economic backgrounds vary in their exposure to high levels of particulate matter (PM2.5) at school, and secondly, if the effect of exposure to poor air quality on academic performance differs between children from high and low socio-economic status families. Utilizing a novel dataset comprising test scores in math and reading for 456,508 8th-grade students, collected nationally in Italy in 2019, we geocode the locations of 6882 schools based on their addresses and link the level of air pollution in the surrounding areas using PM2.5 data from the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group. To address potential confounding factors, we estimate municipality and province fixed effects and control for indicators of school neighborhood characteristics and school quality. Our analysis yields three key findings. Firstly, students from higher socio-economic backgrounds tend to attend schools with higher PM2.5 levels. However, the positive association between SES and exposure to PM2.5 disappears when adding province and municipality fixed effects, suggesting that the positive association can be explained by selection into provinces and municipalities by SES. Secondly, we identify a small yet consistent negative effect of PM2.5 on math and reading test scores. Thirdly, this adverse impact is primarily observed among students from low socio-economic backgrounds. We conclude that the relationship between environmental risks and disparities in educational achievement based on social background in Italy is nuanced and critically influenced by the country's specific context.