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Franz Buscha, University of Westminster and Patrick Sturgis, University of Southampton
(Project no. 0301484, previously 30148)
This project is the core of an ESRC submission by the University of Southampton and the University of Westminster (in April 2012) with the aim to examine whether social mobility has changed over time. It is an evolution of the current ONS LS project 30139 by the same authors. We will analyse LS data to examine whether the association between origin and destination has changed in the various censuses [1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011]. It is important to note that we also hope to analyse the 2011 data. The analysis we aim to undertake will be of an econometric nature.
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to compare occupational outcomes of individuals in the various censuses [1971-2011] and compare these to the occupational statuses of their parents [1971-2001].
Background: Social mobility, or fluidity, is generally taken as a key indicator of the openness and fairness of a society. The idea that an individual's life outcomes should be a function of their ability and effort rather than the socio-economic position of their parents is fundamental to ideals of liberal democracy. Although social mobility has long been the focus of sociological investigation, recent years have witnessed its emergence as a core feature of the political landscape, with parties of all political hues claiming it as a key policy objective. Yet, despite widespread agreement about the importance of promoting social mobility through government policy intervention, there is a lack of consensus on the fundamental issue of whether and how the association between origin and destination has changed, if at all, in the latter part of the 20th century. Recent empirical investigations have concluded that, since the late 1950s, mobility has been declining (Blanden and Machin 2007), increasing (Lambert et al 2008) and remaining broadly the same (Goldthorpe and Jackson 2007). Logically, not all can be correct.
Detail: The objective of this project is to address this important lacuna by producing robust estimates of intergenerational social mobility across cohorts for individuals born since the late-1950s and running to those born until the mid-1990s. To do this, we will analyse data from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links 1% samples from the decennial census between 1971 and 2011. The key advantages of the ONS LS for our purposes are that:
a) The social class origin of sample members is directly observed at different points in the life-course, including during childhood. This means that, unlike the vast majority of sociological investigations, it is not necessary to rely on self-reported occupation of respondents' parents when they were children, which are subject to various kinds of recall and reporting errors. Additionally, it is possible to estimate intergenerational correlations at different points in the individual's life-course (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s) rather than relying on a 'single-shot' measure which may not adequately reflect the individual's long-term socio-economic position during adulthood.
b) The ONS LS has excellent coverage of the population due to the census' low rates of non-compliance, high linkage rates from one census to the next (approximately 98%) and an extremely large sample size (over 1 million records once the 2011 data is linked). Taken together, these features mean that it is possible to produce robust and fine-grained estimates of intergenerational associations, with cohorts defined not just by decade but by year of birth.
It has been acknowledged that one of the likely reasons for the inconsistent findings in the existing literature relates to the different concepts used to measure socio-economic position. While sociologists have used categorical measures of social class, or continuous measures of social status, economists have tended to rely on monetary income. An important feature of our project, therefore, is that we will estimate intergenerational associations using all three types of measure. Because the ONS LS includes detailed information about occupation, it will be possible to use the Cambridge Social interaction Scale (CAMSIS) of occupational social status and the RG measure of social class (or its later alternative, the NS-SEC). Because the census does not contain a question about income, we will impute income using approaches implemented by Nicoletti and Ermisch (2007) and Merad and Ashworth (2010).
As mentioned, this programme of research forms the core of an ESRC [Secondary Data Analysis Initiative phase 1 - 2012] submission. Moreover, we aim to analyse the 2011 wave of the ONS LS data which is due to be released in November 2013.
REFERENCES
BLANDEN, J. and Machin, S. (2007) 'Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain', Report for the Sutton Trust, December.
GOLDTHORPE, J. H. and Jackson, M. (2007) 'Intergenerational class mobility in contemporary Britain: political concerns and empirical findings', British Journal of Sociology, 58(4): 526-46.
LAMBERT, P., Prandy, K. and Bottero, W. (2008) 'By Slow Degrees: Two Centuries of Social Reproduction and Mobility in Britain', Sociological Research Online, 13:1.
NICOLETTI, Cheti, Ermisch, John, 2007. Intergenerational earnings mobility: changes across cohorts in Britain. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy 7, Article 9.
MERAD, S. and Ashworth, K. (2010) 'Predicting household income in the ONS Longitudinal Study', ONS Longitudinal Study Project 20087A