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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1990

Social class, mental illness, and social mobility: the social selection-drift hypothesis for serious mental illness.

The assumptions and methods of previous studies of the social selection-drift hypothesis for serious mental illness are examined by using comtemporary log-linear methods for social mobility analysis. The null hypothesis of no difference in intergenerational social mobility between seriously mentally ill and general population control groups cannot be rejected in previous studies by Birtchnell (1971), Goldberg and Morrison (1963), Langner and Michael (1963), and Turner and Wagenfeld (1967). The findings of this study suggest that previous empirical support for intergenerational social mobility differences is an artifact of not controlling for group differences in origins and destinations when collapsed origin-by-destination tables are analyzed. This study suggests that intergenerational social mobility differences between seriously mentally ill and general population groups in previous studies provide very little, if any, empirical support for social selection-drift processes in serious mental illness.

Female↗
PubMed1993

Re-thinking the analysis of intergenerational social mobility: a comment on John W. Fox's "Social class, mental illness, and social mobility".

The method of analyzing social mobility described by Fox (1990) is flawed in its adjustment for between-group differences in destination status when estimating the extent of the mentally ill's mobility as compared with the general population. Use of the recommended model with hypothetical data sets resulted in a significant finding when no overall upward or downward mobility occurred, and a non-significant result when the downward mobility of a psychotic group was contrived to be massive. An alternative model for the test of group differences in mobility is suggested within the framework of log-linear analysis commended by Fox (1990). This method indicated significantly more downward and less upward mobility in mentally ill groups when data from four studies were re-analyzed. We conclude that the weight of evidence from published studies supports the notion of social selection-drift, although this does not imply the inconsequence of social factors in the aetiology of schizophrenia (and other psychoses) or in its prognosis and occupational consequences.

Humans↗
PubMed1983

Social mobility and the interpretation of social class mortality differentials.

The discussion of health inequalities in Britain (e.g. in the Black Report) has been conducted largely on the basis of social class mortality differentials measured by achieved social class and not by social class of origin. It is shown in this paper that social class mortality differentials by achieved social class are not invariant to the rate of social mobility and that the use of them is likely to result in a biased measure of trends in health inequalities when the absolute rate of social mobility varies over time. It is further shown that if, as is likely, health status is a factor systematically affecting the probability for an individual of upward or downward social mobility, then an increase in the rate of social mobility may well result in constant or widening social class mortality differentials by achieved social class even if the differentials are narrowing when measured by social class of origin. It is claimed that this process may well explain why the observed social class mortality differentials, which are measured by achieved social class, have not fallen in Britain during the post-1945 period.

Health Status Indicators↗
PubMed1999

The roles of social class of origin, achieved social class and intergenerational social mobility in explaining social-class inequalities in alcoholism among young men.

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of intergenerational health-related mobility in explaining social-class inequalities in alcoholism among young men. Data on social class of origin and on risk factors in childhood and adolescence, e.g. risk use of alcohol, were collected for 49,323 men, born 1949-51, at enlistment for compulsory military training in 1969/70. Information on achieved socioeconomic class was obtained from Sweden's 1975 census. Data on alcoholism diagnoses were collected from the national in-patient care register 1976-83. Risk indicators for alcoholism established in adolescence were found to be more common among downwardly mobile individuals, and also among stable manual workers, than among those who ended up as non-manual employees. Downwardly mobile individuals, and also stable manual workers, were also found to have an increased risk of alcoholism diagnosis. The increased relative risk could, to a considerable extent, be attributed to factors from childhood/adolescence. In this longitudinal study, it is shown that intergenerational social mobility associated with health-related factors, albeit not with illness itself, made a major contribution to explaining differences in alcoholism between social classes. Factors established in adolescence were important with regard to differences in alcoholism between social classes among young adults. But such adverse conditions did not seem to be well reflected by social class of origin.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Women's body dissatisfaction, social class, and social mobility.

Several studies indicate that socially advantaged women are more dissatisfied with their bodies than socially disadvantaged women. These findings have been based on women's current social class, and no attention has been paid to the social class of her family of origin or to intergenerational social mobility. In the present research 912 54-year-old women from a prospective birth cohort study provided self-report data on current body esteem (appearance and weight dimensions). Childhood and adult social class (manual versus non-manual) were defined based on father's occupation and own or partner's occupation, respectively. This information and the highest educational qualifications recorded by age 26 were gathered prospectively. Indicators of current and adolescent body mass index (BMI) were computed from height and weight values collected at ages 15 (or 11) and 53-54 years. Multiple regression was used to examine the relationship between midlife body esteem and childhood social class, adult social class, educational qualifications, and social mobility, unadjusted and adjusted for BMI. Women from the non-manual classes as adults were more dissatisfied with their weight than women from the manual classes as adults, for a given BMI. Adjusting for BMI, downwardly mobile women were more satisfied with their appearance than stable non-manual women. Adjusting for BMI, higher educational qualifications were associated with more dissatisfaction with weight and with appearance, and education appears to be more important than occupationally defined social class in explaining body dissatisfaction. A clearer understanding of the relationship between socio-economic position and body dissatisfaction demands that the following distinctions are made: weight versus appearance satisfaction, education versus occupation, and current social class versus intergenerational social mobility.

Body Image↗
PubMed1996

Inequalities in self rated health in the 1958 birth cohort: lifetime social circumstances or social mobility?

OBJECTIVE: To investigate explanations for social inequalities in health with respect to health related social mobility and cumulative socioeconomic circumstances over the first three decades of life. DESIGN: Longitudinal follow up. SETTING: Great Britain. SUBJECTS: Data from the 1958 birth cohort study (all children born in England, Wales, and Scotland during 3-9 March 1958) were used, from the original birth survey and from sweeps at 16, 23, and 33 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Subjects' own ratings of their health; social differences in self rated health at age 33. RESULTS: Social mobility varied by health status, with those reporting poor health at age 23 having higher odds of downward mobility than of staying in same social class. Men with poor health were also less likely to be upwardly mobile. Prevalence of poor health at age 33 increased with decreasing social class: from 8.5% in classes I and II to 17.7% in classes IV and V among men, and from 9.4% to 18.8% among women. These social differences remained significant after adjustment for effects of social mobility. Health inequalities attenuated when adjusted for social class at birth, at age 16, or at 23 or for self rated health at age 23. When adjusted for all these variables simultaneously, social differences in self rated health at age 33 were substantially reduced and no longer significant. CONCLUSIONS: Lifetime socioeconomic circumstances accounted for inequalities in self reported health at age 33, while social mobility did not have a major effect on health inequalities.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

How lower- and working-class youth become middle-class adults: the association between ego defense mechanisms and upward social mobility.

This is a report of social mobility in 278 inner-city men studied for 4 decades and over 3 generations. 63.3% of the men and 59.8% of their children were upwardly mobile. 8 variables captured 28% of the explained variance in upward social mobility: IQ, mother's education, mother's occupation, boyhood ego strength, and four ego defense mechanisms--intellectualization, dissociation, sublimation, and anticipation. Of the 8 variables, intellectualization--the capacity to isolate ideation from the associated affect--explained the most unique variance, especially over 3 generations. Childhood relations of subjects with parents and father's IQ exerted no discernible effect on children's upward social mobility.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Health-related social mobility: a comparison of currently employed men and women in Britain and Finland.

Selective health-related social mobility has been suggested as one possible explanation for health inequalities. The aim of this paper is to examine the size and significance of the contribution which health-related social mobility makes to social class differences in health. We do this by examining the association between intergenerational social mobility and health among currently employed men and women in Britain and Finland. We used comparable nationally representative interview surveys from Britain and Finland. The British data is derived from the General Household Survey for 1988 and 1989, and the Finnish data from the 1986 Survey on Living Conditions. Health measures included limiting long-standing illness and self-assessed health as below good. Social mobility was measured comparing the respondent's class of origin (father's occupation) with his/her class of destination (own current occupation). Social structural changes and related social mobility have been more dramatic in Finland than in Britain during the last few decades. Downward mobility has been relatively rare, and mobility has taken place predominantly upwards. In Finland downward mobility from upper non-manual to manual worker was associated with a somewhat higher risk of limiting long-standing illness than expected among men as well as women. However, there was no statistically significant interaction effect on health between the respondent's father's occupational class and his/her own current class. In Britain, neither self-assessed health nor limiting long-standing illness were related to social mobility. Some weak evidence for health-related downward social mobility was found for currently employed Finnish men and women, but not for their British counterparts. Moreover, the evidence is weaker for self-assessed health than for limiting long-standing illness. Where social mobility may have been health-related, it concerns very rare and small groups; therefore health inequalities among the currently employed cannot be explained by intergenerational health-related social mobility.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Stature, upward social mobility and the nature of statural differences between social classes.

Stature and educational level achieved were studied in 10 groups of 19-year-old Polish men born in 1967 and examined in 1986. Each group consisted of subjects equated for (1) parental education and occupation, (2) urban-rural residence and (3) number of children in family. It was found that within each group subjects who were secondary school students or graduates were on average taller than their age-mates who by the time of examination had never moved beyond the level of elementary or basic trade school. This result is consistent with the long-debated hypothesis that in industrial societies upward social mobility tends to be selective with regard to body height. Theoretically, such social selection could be expected to inflate the magnitude of social-class differences in stature by adding to them a genetic component. However, a mechanism can be envisaged by which preferential recruitment of taller individuals to upper social strata might indeed be at work and yet produce no differential distribution of genotypes along the social scale.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Early childhood development and social mobility.

Steven Barnett and Clive Belfield examine the effects of preschool education on social mobility in the United States. They note that under current policy three- and four-year-old children from economically and educationally disadvantaged families have higher preschool attendance rates than other children. But current programs fail to enroll even half of poor three- and four-year-olds. Hispanics and children of mothers who drop out of school also participate at relatively low rates. The programs also do little to improve learning and development. The most effective programs, they explain, are intensive interventions such as the model Abecedarian and Perry Preschool programs, which feature highly qualified teachers and small group sizes. State preschool programs with the highest standards rank next, followed by Head Start and the average state program, which produce effects ranging from one-tenth to one-quarter of those of the best programs. Typical child care and family support programs rank last. Barnett and Belfield point out that preschool programs raise academic skills on average, but do not appear to have notably different effects for different groups of children, and so do not strongly enhance social mobility. In such areas as crime, welfare, and teen parenting, however, preschool seems more able to break links between parental behaviors and child outcomes. Increased investment in preschool, conclude Barnett and Belfield, could raise social mobility. Program expansions targeted to disadvantaged children would help them move up the ladder, as would a more universal set of policies from which disadvantaged children gained disproportionately. Increasing the educational effectiveness of early childhood programs would provide for greater gains in social mobility than increasing participation rates alone. The authors observe that if future expansions of preschool programs end up serving all children, not just the poorest, society as a whole would gain. Benefits would exceed costs and there would be more economic growth, but relative gains for disadvantaged children would be smaller than absolute gains because there would be some (smaller) benefits to other children.

Child Development↗
PubMed1999

Social mobility and health related behaviours in young people.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To assess the influences related to social mobility, particularly health related behaviours, as one potential explanation for the social class variation in health among adults. DESIGN: The study is based on questionnaire data from the Adolescent Health and Lifestyle Surveys of 1985, 1987, and 1989. SETTING: The whole of Finland. PARTICIPANTS: A representative sample of 8355 adolescents. The response rate was 79%. MEASUREMENT AND MAIN RESULTS: The relation between social mobility and health related behaviours among 16 and 18 year old young people was studied. The measure of social mobility was based on a combination of the social class of origin and achieved social position measured by the present educational status, educational attainment, and labour market position. Three mobility groups were constructed: the downwardly mobile, the upwardly mobile and the stable. Health related behaviours in an upwardly or downwardly mobile group were compared with a stable group from the same social class of origin by calculating relative risks (RR). RRs were assessed by calculating age and sex adjusted rate ratios approximating a Mantel-Haenszel estimate. In logistic regression analyses the independent effects of the social class of origin and the achieved social position were investigated. Most of the nine behaviours studied (smoking, alcohol use, heavy intoxication, coffee drinking, tooth brushing, consumption of sweets, lack of physical exercise, choice of bread spread, and consumption of milk) were related to the direction of mobility so that health compromising behaviours were more frequent among downwardly mobile and less frequent among upwardly mobile young people than their stable peers. Achieved social position proved to determine health related behaviours more strongly than class of origin, thus emphasising the way education facilitates both health values and behaviours as well as the future social position. CONCLUSIONS: The close relation between social mobility and health related behaviours is concluded to be a part of an explanation of social class differences in health observed among adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Making it in America: social mobility in the immigrant population.

In his survey of research on social mobility and U.S. immigration, George Borjas underscores two insights. First, most immigrants are at a sizable earnings disadvantage, relative to native-born workers. Second, the earnings of different groups of immigrants vary widely. The children of immigrants "catch up" to native-born workers slowly. The jump in relative wages between the first and second generations is somewhere between 5 and 10 percentage points. Of particular concern is that the age-adjusted relative wage of both immigrants and second-generation workers has been falling--a trend with bleak implications for the children of immigrants. The wide ethnic variation in the earnings of immigrants has equally important implications. National origin groups from advanced economies, such as Canada, do much better in the U.S. labor market than those from poorer countries, such as Mexico. And the initial ethnic differences tend to persist. In rough terms, about half of the difference in relative economic status persists from one generation to the next. Thus a 20 percentage point wage gap among ethnic groups in the immigrant generation implies a 10 point gap among second-generation groups and a 5 point gap among third-generation groups. Again in rough terms, Borjas attributes about half of that persistence to the ethnic environment in which children are raised. Borjas cautions that the rate of social mobility that immigrants enjoyed over much of the twentieth century may not continue in the future. The employment sectors seeking immigrants today are unlikely to provide the same growth opportunities as did the rapidly expanding manufacturing sector a century ago. And in contrast to the many and diverse ethnic groups that made up early twentieth-century immigrants, the large ethnic groups of immigrants today may develop separate economies and social structures, in effect hindering their social mobility.

Achievement↗
PubMed2004

Social mobility and health in the Turin longitudinal study.

One of the most controversial explanations of class inequalities in health is the health selection hypothesis or drift hypothesis which suggests there is a casual link between the health status of individuals and their chances of social mobility, both inter- and intra-generational. This study tests this hypothesis, and tries to answer three related questions: (a) to what extent does health status influence the chances of intra-generational mobility of individuals? (b) what is the impact on health inequalities of the various kinds of social mobility (both mobility in the labour market and exit from employment)-do they increase or reduce inequalities? (c) to what extent does health-related intra-generational social mobility contribute to the production of health inequalities? The data analysed in this paper were drawn from the records of the Turin Longitudinal Study, which was set up to monitor health inequality of the Turin population by combining census data, population registry records and medical records. Occupational mobility was observed during the decade 1981-1991. To evaluate the impact of the various processes of social mobility on health inequalities, mortality was observed over the period 1991-1999. The study population consists of men and women aged 25-49 at the beginning of mortality follow-up (1991), and registered as resident in Turin at both the 1981 and the 1991 censuses (N = 127,384). Health status was determined by observing hospital admission. For the purpose of the study healthy individuals were those with no hospital admissions during the period 1984-1986, while those admitted were classed as unhealthy. Social mobility in the labour market was measured via an interval data index of upward and downward movements on a scale of social desirability of occupations, designed for the Italian labour force via an empirical study carried out by de Lillo and Schizzerotto (La valutazione sociale delle occupazioni. Una scala di stratificazione occupazionale per l'Italia contemporanea, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1985). Movement out of the labour market was described by a discrete variable with four conditions: employed, unemployed, early retired and women returning from work to the housewife status. The relationship between health status and occupational mobility was analysed via analysis of variance and multinomial logistic regression. Health inequalities were measured by the ratio of standardised mortality rates in the unskilled working class and the upper middle class. The study found a weak relationship between health status and occupational mobility chances. Decidedly stronger was the impact on occupational mobility of gender, education and "ethnicity" (being born in the South of Italy). The relationship between occupational mobility and health takes two different forms. Occupational mobility in the labour market decreases health inequalities; occupational mobility out of the labour market (early retirement, unemployment, housewife return) widens them. The maximum contribution health-related intra-generational social mobility can make towards health inequalities was estimated at about 13% for men.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Religion, social mobility and education in Scotland.

The relationship among religion, education and social mobility in Scotland is analysed statistically using the Scottish Household Survey of 2001. The large sample size allows much greater statistical power for this purpose than any previous source, and thus allows a more reliable assessment of claims that the stratifying effect of religion in Scotland may have declined. The questions investigated are as follows. What are the religious differences in the distributions of class origins and class destinations, in the movement between these (absolute mobility), and in the association of these (relative mobility, or social fluidity)? Do changes in social fluidity across cohorts vary among people with different religious affiliation? Are there religious differences in the association of origins and education, in the association of education and destinations, or in the role of education in social fluidity, and do any of these vary over cohorts? The conclusions are that, in younger cohorts, there is no religious difference in social status, and that in older cohorts Catholics are generally of lower status than Protestants and the non-religious. Social fluidity does not, however, vary among religious groups, even for older cohorts, and does not change over time. The reason for convergence in social status of religious groups over time is probably the equalizing of educational attainment among the groups: there is no evidence for any of the cohorts that the labour-market rewards to education differ by religion.

Education↗
PubMed1997

Inequality, economic growth and social mobility.

This paper develops a model of intergenerational mobility and intragenerational inequality that allows us to explore the relationship between economic growth and social mobility. The model is used to analyse the neo-liberal theory of stratification and to assess the consequences of some of the criticisms that have been made of it. In particular, the intergenerational transmission of wealth and privilege, and the existence of ethnic, gender and other forms of ascriptive disadvantage, reduce economic efficiency, although they do not always diminish the extent of social mobility. Furthermore, excessive intragenerational inequality may inhibit, rather than encourage, economic growth. We show that there is no necessary link between rates of social mobility and levels of economic growth. This, we suggest, provides an explanation of why rates of social mobility show very little cross-national variation and display no very evident trend over time towards greater societal openness.

Female↗
PubMed2006

Intergenerational social mobility: the United States in comparative perspective.

Emily Beller and Michael Hout examine trends in U.S. social mobility, especially as it relates to the degree to which a person's income or occupation depends on his or her parents' background and to the independent contribution of economic growth. They also compare U.S. social mobility with that in other countries. They conclude that slower economic growth since 1975 and the concentration of that growth among the wealthy have slowed the pace of U.S. social mobility. In measuring mobility, economists tend to look at income and sociologists, occupation. The consensus among those measuring occupational mobility is that the average correlation between the occupations of fathers and sons today ranges from 0.30 to 0.40, meaning that most variation in the ranking of occupations is independent of social origins. Those measuring income mobility tend to agree that the elasticity between fathers' and sons' earnings in the United States today is about 0.4, meaning that 40 percent of the difference in incomes between families in the parents' generation also shows up in differences in incomes in the sons' generation. Beller and Hout show that occupational mobility increased during the 1970s, compared with the 1940s-1960s, but there is some evidence to suggest that by the 1980s and 1990s it had declined to past levels. Existing data on income mobility show no clear trends over time, but increases in economic inequality during the 1980s made mobility more consequential by making economic differences between families persist for a longer time. In international comparisons, the United States occupies a middle ground in occupational mobility but ranks lower in income mobility. Researchers have used the variation in mobility to study whether aspects of a country's policy regime, such as the educational or social welfare systems, might be driving these results. There is as yet, however, no scholarly consensus about the sources of cross-national differences in mobility.

Career Mobility↗