Does intergenerational mobility shape psychological distress? Sorokin revisited

Does intergenerational educational mobility vary by sexual identity? A comparative analysis of five OECD countries

Lesbian, gay and bisexual people are disadvantaged in terms of health and socio-economic status compared with heterosexual people, yet findings pertaining to educational outcomes vary depending on the specific identity and gender considered. This study delves into these unexplained findings by applying a social-stratification lens, thereby providing an account of how intergenerational educational mobility varies by sexual identity. To accomplish this, we use representative data from five OECD countries and a regression-based empirical specification relying on coarsened exact matching. We find that gay and lesbian people have higher educational attainment than heterosexual people in all five countries and that these higher levels of education stem from greater rates of upward educational mobility among gay/lesbian people. There were, however, few differences between heterosexual and bisexual people. Variation across countries emerged when analyses were stratified by gender, with higher rates of upward mobility observed for gay men in Australia, Chile, the United Kingdom, and the United States and lesbian women in Australia and Germany. Overall, our results align with previous claims that education can be a strategy for gay/lesbian people to avoid actual or anticipated discrimination. However, variation in these patterns across groups suggests that other mechanisms may also be at play.

Social mobility and mental health in Canada

OBJECTIVES

To investigate whether intergenerational mobility in education and income are associated with levels of psychological distress in Canada, a context in which rates of intergenerational mobility are higher than those of the United States but lower than those of Nordic countries.

METHODS

The data came from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) linked to tax records from the Canada Revenue Agency (N = 4100). Diagonal reference models were used to investigate whether educational mobility and income mobility were associated with levels of psychological distress in adulthood as assessed by the Kessler (K-10) scale. The models controlled for sociodemographic characteristics and were stratified by gender.

RESULTS

Although we did not find that mobility in general was associated with greater levels of psychological distress, we found that downward educational mobility in particular corresponded to higher levels of psychological distress (b = 0.15 with 95% CI = 0.00, 0.31) among men.

CONCLUSION

Overall, we found no strong evidence that social mobility in general is impactful for levels of psychological distress, but downward educational mobility in particular may have negative consequences for the mental health of men. In addition, a notable gradient between income and psychological distress in adulthood was observed for both women and men.

The mobility effects hypothesis: Methods and applications

We discuss hypotheses researchers have put forth to explain how outcomes of socially mobile and immobile individuals might differ and/or how mobility experiences are related to outcomes of interest. Next, we examine the methodological literature on this topic, culminating in the development of the diagonal mobility model (DMM, also called the diagonal reference model in some studies), the primary tool of use since the 1980's. We then discuss some of the many applications of the DMM. Although the model was proposed to examine the effects of social mobility on outcomes of interest, the estimated relationships between mobility and outcomes that researchers have called mobility effects are more appropriately regarded as partial associations. When mobility is not associated with outcomes, as is often found in empirical work, the outcomes of movers from origin o to destination d are a weighted average of the outcomes of individuals who remained in states o and d respectively, and the weights capture the relative salience of origins and destinations in the acculturation process. In light of this attractive feature of the model, we briefly develop several generalizations of the current DMM that future researchers should also find useful. Finally, we propose new estimands of mobility effects, based on the explicit notion that a unit effect of mobility is a comparison of an individual with herself under two conditions, one in which she is mobile, the other in which she is immobile, and we discuss some of the challenges in identifying such effects.

Educational Mobility and Attitudes Towards Migration from an International Comparative Perspective

This work considers the role of intergenerational educational mobility in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Two substantive questions drive this work. First, does the experience of stagnant or downward educational mobility result in negative attitudes towards immigration? Second, are perceptions of immigration shaped by the relative importance of parental (i.e. origin) and one's own (i.e. destination) level of education? We deploy six waves of the European Social Survey (ESS) to assess how upward, downward and stagnant intergenerational educational mobility shape attitudes towards immigration across 31 countries. Results show that upward educational mobility can moderate antipathy towards immigration, but this is more applicable in country-contexts where parental education is less relevant. In other words, education matters for our understanding of how immigration is viewed, but its role must be framed in a way that takes into account multiple generations.

The Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction Model for Describing and Investigating Inter-cohort Deviations and Intra-cohort Life-course Dynamics

Social scientists have frequently sought to understand the distinct effects of age, period, and cohort, but disaggregation of the three dimensions is difficult because cohort = period - age. We argue that this technical difficulty reflects a disconnection between how cohort effect is conceptualized and how it is modeled in the traditional age-period-cohort framework. We propose a new method, called the age-period-cohort-interaction (APC-I) model, that is qualitatively different from previous methods in that it represents Ryder's (1965) theoretical account about the conditions under which cohort differentiation may arise. This APC-I model does not require problematic statistical assumptions and the interpretation is straightforward. It quantifies inter-cohort deviations from the age and period main effects and also permits hypothesis testing about intra-cohort life-course dynamics. We demonstrate how this new model can be used to examine age, period, and cohort patterns in women's labor force participation.

Adult Children's Intergenerational Mobility and Older Adults' Self-Rated Health: A US-China Comparison

OBJECTIVES

This study examines whether and how adult children's educational mobility is associated with the self-rated health of older adults aged 50 and above in China and the United States.

METHODS

The analytic sample included 12,445 Chinese respondents from the 2011-2013 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, and 17,121 US respondents from the 2010-2012 Health and Retirement Study. Multinomial logistic regression was employed to examine the relationship between children's educational mobility and parents' self-rated health, and the KHB-method was used for mediation analysis.

RESULTS

Adult children's upward mobility was associated with their parents' better health in both countries. This association was mediated by child-to-parent economic support, as well as parents' social engagement and depressive symptoms in China; in the United States, parents' depression was the only significant mediator.

DISCUSSION

This study is among the first to empirically show the benefit of adult children's upward mobility for their parents' health. The cross-national differences in the mediating paths suggest that the crossover effect of children's intergenerational mobility on their parents' health is embedded within specific sociocultural contexts.

Heterogeneous Effects of Intergenerational Social Mobility: An Improved Method and New Evidence

Intergenerational social mobility has immense implications for individuals' well-being, attitudes, and behaviors. However, previous methods may be unreliable for estimating heterogeneous mobility effects, especially in the presence of moderate- or large-scale intergenerational mobility. We propose an improved method, called the "mobility contrast model" (MCM). Using simulation evidence, we demonstrated that the MCM is more flexible and reliable for estimating and testing heterogeneous mobility effects, and the results are robust to the scale of intergenerational mobility. We revisited the debate about the effect of mobility on fertility and analyzed data from the 1962 Occupational Changes in a Generation Study (OCG-1) and more recent data from the 1974 through 2018 General Social Survey (GSS) using both previous models and the MCM. The MCM suggested a small association between fertility and occupational mobility in the GSS data but substantial and heterogeneous educational mobility effects on fertility in the OCG-1 and the GSS. Such effects were difficult to pinpoint using previous methods because mobility effects of different magnitudes and opposite directions among mobility groups may cancel out. The new method can be extended to investigate the effect of intergenerational mobility across multiple generations and other research areas including immigrant assimilation and heterogamy.

Social Mobility, Health and Wellbeing in Poland

Recently there has been a surge of interest in the consequences of intergenerational social mobility on individuals' health and wellbeing outcomes. However, studies on the effects of social mobility on health, using high-quality panel survey data, have almost exclusively been conducted in Western welfare democracies. To account for this gap, and using empirical data from one of the largest and most eventful post-communist countries, Poland, in this study we investigate how individuals' origin and destination socio-economic position and social mobility are linked to self-rated health and reported psychological wellbeing. We use the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN) data to construct self-rated health and psychological wellbeing measures, origin, destination and occupational class mobility variables, and account for an extensive set of sociodemographic determinants of health. We employ diagonal reference models to distinguish social mobility effects from origin and destination effects, and account for possible health selection mechanisms. Our results suggest that there is an occupational class gradient in health in Poland and that both parental and own occupational class matter for individual health outcomes. We also find a positive reported psychological wellbeing effect for upward social mobility from the working to the professional class.

Social mobility, adolescents' psycho-social dispositions, and parenting

Psycho-social dispositions and parental influence are central in early status attainment models. We apply the Social Structure and Personality framework to investigate the contributions of adolescents' psycho-social dispositions to social mobility, and then the contributions of parents' socioeconomic status (SES) and parenting to adolescents' psycho-social dispositions. The Kaplan Longitudinal and Multigenerational Study includes data on two generations of respondents: the first-generation of respondents was observed from seventh grade in 1971 until midlife, and the second-generation, their children, was observed from adolescence to young adulthood. We find that upward social mobility is inhibited by poor psycho-social dispositions, particularly by negative self-feelings. SES, in turn, also affects psycho-social dispositions. Family income is more relevant (i.e., variance explained) than parental education for adolescents' locus of control, while parental education is more relevant for adolescents' negative self-feelings. Finally, our findings indicate that parenting can disrupt the cycle of social reproduction, with lower SES adolescents exhibiting lower levels of negative self-feelings if their parents are more attached or less authoritarian.

Intergenerational social mobility and self-rated health in Canada

A growing body of research seeks to reveal the health effects of 'falling from grace' or 'rising from rags,' i.e., experiencing downward or upward mobility relative to one's family socioeconomic background. In this study, we mobilized a unique dataset, the 2012 Longitudinal and International Study of Adults linked to historical income data from the Canada Revenue Agency, to investigate associations between both educational and income mobility and self-rated health in a national sample of approximately 2500 women and 2300 men aged 25 to 50. Compared to educational immobility, extreme downward educational mobility corresponded to elevated odds of reporting good/fair/poor health among women (OR = 3.053; 95% CI = 0.991 … 9.393). Compared to income immobility, downward income mobility in general (OR = 1.533; 95% CI = 1.115 … 2.106) and extreme downward income mobility in particular (OR = 2.389; 95% CI = 1.481 … 3.854) both corresponded to elevated odds of reporting good/fair/poor health among women. Among men, extreme upward income mobility (OR = 0.674; 95% CI = 0.463 … 0.984) corresponded to reduced odds of reporting good/fair/poor health and extreme downward income mobility (OR = 2.237; 95% CI = 1.157 … 4.323) corresponded to elevated odds of reporting good/fair/poor health, compared to men with immobile incomes. In summary, upward income mobility was beneficial for men's self-rated health, downward educational mobility was detrimental to the self-rated health of women, and downward income mobility was detrimental to the self-rated health of both women and men in this Canadian study.

Socioeconomic position, social mobility, and health selection effects on allostatic load in the United States

The contemporaneous association between higher socioeconomic position and better health is well established. Life course research has also demonstrated a lasting effect of childhood socioeconomic conditions on adult health and well-being. Yet, little is known about the separate health effects of intergenerational mobility-moving into a different socioeconomic position than one's parents-among early adults in the United States. Most studies on the health implications of mobility rely on cross-sectional datasets, which makes it impossible to differentiate between health selection and social causation effects. In addition, understanding the effects of social mobility on health at a relatively young age has been hampered by the paucity of health measures that reliably predict disease onset. Analysing 4,713 respondents aged 25 to 32 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health's Waves I and IV, we use diagonal reference models to separately identify the effects of socioeconomic origin and destination, as well as social mobility on allostatic load among individuals in the United States. Using a combined measure of educational and occupational attainment, and accounting for individuals' initial health, we demonstrate that in addition to health gradient among the socially immobile, individuals' socioeconomic origin and destination are equally important for multi-system physiological dysregulation. Short-range upward mobility also has a positive and significant association with health. After mitigating health selection concerns in our observational data, this effect is observed only among those reporting poor health before experiencing social mobility. Our findings move towards the reconciliation of two theoretical perspectives, confirming the positive effect of upward mobility as predicted by the "rags to riches" perspective, while not contradicting potential costs associated with more extensive upward mobility experiences as predicted by the dissociative thesis.

Intergenerational social mobility and health in Russia: Mind over matter?

The consequences of changing one's socio-economic status over the life course-i.e. social mobility-for individual health are not well understood. Theories of the health implications of social mobility draw on the human perception of one's changing conditions, but empirical studies mostly examine the health implications of moving from objectively defined indicators of parental socio-economic position such as education, occupation, or income, to own socio-economic position in adult life. Little is known about the consequences of individuals' own assessment of changes in socio-economic position for health outcomes. In this study, we examine the association of social mobility and health in a unique sample of the Russian population after the transition to a market society. We take a broad perspective on social mobility, putting emphasis on subjectively perceived social mobility. Results show that individuals' objective characteristics only partially explain the variation in their subjective perceptions of intergenerational mobility. Net of social origin and destination variables, subjective social mobility is associated with individuals' health outcomes, as measured by the 12-Item Short Form Health Survey. Those who perceive being upwardly mobile report better health, and downward mobility is associated with poorer health. The association holds for mental and physical health, for perceived downward and upward social mobility, and for a general subjective measure of mobility and a subjective measure prompting respondents to only think of mobility in terms of occupation. These findings are robust to controlling for a rich set of socio-demographic predictors on childhood adversity, contemporaneous material wellbeing, and family-related circumstances. We conclude that a conventional focus on single socio-economic status dimensions such as occupation might be too narrow to capture the health consequences of social mobility.

The Consequences of Incarceration for Mortality in the United States

Previous research has suggested that incarceration has negative implications for individuals' well-being, health, and mortality. Most of these studies, however, have not followed former prisoners over an extended period and into older adult ages, when the risk of health deterioration and mortality is the greatest. Contributing to this literature, this study is the first to employ the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate the long-run association between individual incarceration and mortality over nearly 40 years. We also supplement those analyses with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). We then use these estimates to investigate the implications of the U.S. incarceration regime and the post-1980 incarceration boom for the U.S. health and mortality disadvantage relative to industrialized peer countries (the United Kingdom).

Objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status, Their Discrepancy, and Health: Evidence from East Asia

Socioeconomic status (SES) is largely understood to be a fundamental determinant of health. Recently, subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) has emerged as a potentially important predictor of health above and beyond traditional (i.e., objective) SES indicators (OSS). The current study adds to this emerging body of research by examining the potentially important role of status discrepancies for health outcomes. We used nationally representative data from three East Asian countries (China, Japan, and South Korea) (2010 East Asian Social Survey) and a non-linear statistical technique (i.e., diagonal mobility model) to simultaneously model the independent contributions of OSS and SSS and their discrepancy for three health outcomes. Findings showed that SSS does, in fact, explain additional variation in health net of OSS in most cases, and status discrepancy is not associated with any of the three health outcomes. While status discrepancy was not found to be a driving factor in determining the predictive power of SSS net of OSS (at least in East Asia), the present study adds robustness to the accumulating evidence that challenges the social inequality hypothesis and provides a basis from which future research can build and contribute further to the understanding surrounding socioeconomic status and health outcomes.

Social mobility and the well-being of individuals

Several papers published in recent years have revived interest in Sorokin's dissociative thesis: the view that intergenerational social mobility has detrimental effects on the social relationships and wellbeing of individuals. In this paper, I test the dissociative thesis using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society. On a wide range of indicators that measure participation in civic associations, contact with parents, close personal relationships, social support, subjective wellbeing, etc. individuals who have achieved long-range upward mobility (i.e. those who move from working class origin to salariat destination) tend to fare better than those who are immobile in the working class. Those who have experienced long-range downward mobility (moving from salariat origin to working class destination) do about as well as second-generation members of the working class. Overall, there is no support for Sorokin's thesis.

Modern Social Hierarchies and the Spaces between: How Are Subjective Status Inconsistencies Linked to Mental Well-Being?

Higher socioeconomic status is linked to higher mental well-being, but modern individuals inhabit multiple hierarchies and reference groups—and thus well-being may be determined between as much as within socioeconomic statuses. Drawing on proprietary national data collected by Gallup in 2017, I find that inconsistency between one’s perceived standing in society and one’s standing in more local hierarchies based in neighbors or friends is quite common. Individuals with negative status inconsistency (lower perceived status among one’s neighbors or friends relative to society) exhibit diminished mental well-being relative to those without. Relational or interpersonal mechanisms, including lower closeness to others, anomie or social disengagement, and diminished meaning in life, appear to partially or mostly explain how status inconsistencies undermine well-being. However, these relational mechanisms vary in their explanatory importance across types of inconsistencies and types of well-being. Positive and negative status inconsistencies both show links to lower-quality social relations.

Intergenerational Mobility in Relative Educational Attainment and Health-Related Behaviours

Research on intergenerational social mobility and health-related behaviours yields mixed findings. Depending on the direction of mobility and the type of mechanisms involved, we can expect positive or negative association between intergenerational mobility and health-related behaviours. Using data from a retrospective cohort study, conducted in more than 100 towns across Belarus, Hungary and Russia, we fit multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regressions with two measures of health-related behaviours: binge drinking and smoking. The main explanatory variable, intergenerational educational mobility is operationalised in terms of relative intergenerational educational trajectories based on the prevalence of specified qualifications in parental and offspring generations. In each country the associations between intergenerational educational mobility, binge drinking and smoking was examined with incidence rate ratios and predicted probabilities, using multiply imputed dataset for missing data and controlling for important confounders of health-related behaviours. We find that intergenerational mobility in relative educational attainment has varying association with binge drinking and smoking and the strength and direction of these effects depend on the country of analysis, the mode of mobility, the gender of respondents and the type of health-related behaviour. Along with accumulation and Falling from Grace hypotheses of the consequences of intergenerational mobility, our findings suggest that upward educational mobility in certain instances might be linked to improved health-related behaviours.

Intergenerational Mobility and Changes in Drug Use Across the Life Course

The consequences of “falling from grace”—or experiencing downward intergenerational mobility—are indeed becoming an abrupt reality for many entering the labor force. Scholars of social mobility speculate that such life course trajectories can result in antisocial behavior, but few have examined whether these trajectories lead to drug use. Thus, with the United States in the midst of a drug epidemic, as well as recovering from an economic recession, the study of social mobility may contribute to a better understanding of what causes individuals to turn to drugs. Using data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and a series of logistic diagonal reference models, this study examines the association between intergenerational social mobility and drug use. Overall, I find evidence that downward mobility is associated with increases in drug use, with the relationship strongest among those experiencing the greatest loss in status.

Does Intergenerational Educational Mobility Shape the Well-Being of Young Europeans? Evidence from the European Social Survey

Using pooled European Social Survey data (Rounds 4-7, 2008-2014), we investigate the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and subjective well-being (SWB) for young Europeans (N = 16,050 individuals aged 25-34 from 18 countries). Previous research has been struggling with inconclusive results due to the methodological challenge of disentangling the independent (i.e., 'net') effect of social mobility over and above the effects of social origin and destination. We contribute to this line of research by contrasting mobility effects estimated in a conventional linear regression framework with net mobility effects estimated by (non-linear) diagonal mobility models (DMM). We show how model selection influences estimates of mobility effects and how different specifications lead to radically different findings. Using DMM, we estimate how intergenerational educational mobility affects the SWB of young Europeans, differentiating between downward and upward mobility and different country groups. Our results suggest that status loss/gain across generations affects young adults' SWB in addition to the level-effect of ending up in a lower/higher status position only in Continental Europe.

Too much of a good thing? Economic growth and human rights, 1960 to 2010

Despite widespread belief in the benefits of economic growth, some scholars emphasize the potentially negative consequences of growth-and especially rapid growth-for social and political outcomes. Using data for 149 countries between 1960 and 2010, I analyze the effect of economic growth on fundamental human rights conditions. Dynamic random-effects and two-way fixed-effects estimators, both with and without instrumental variables, yield several conclusions. First, economic growth is causally prior to rights conditions. Second, economic growth has a modest positive effect on human rights, albeit with diminishing returns at high growth rates. Third, low-income countries account for much of this relationship: growth improves rights conditions for most low-income countries, but extremely rapid growth is inimical. Growth has little effect among middle-income countries, while for high-income countries the relationship is positive but not robust. I bring these findings to bear on long-standing debates between proponents and critics of modernization theory.

Child-rearing values: The impact of intergenerational class mobility

This study contrasts two theoretical perspectives on the relationship between intergenerational class mobility and child-rearing values. According to the dissociative thesis, which describes social mobility as a disruptive experience leading to insecurity, social isolation, stress and frustration, socially mobile individuals less often prefer community-oriented qualities such as tolerance and respect for other people, unselfishness, good manners and obedience. The beneficiary thesis, on the other hand, predicts that socially mobile individuals have a stronger preference for individual-based values such as hard work, determination, responsibility, independence and thrift. In both cases, these mobility effects are thought to be stronger for more extremely mobile individuals and for downwardly mobile compared with upwardly mobile individuals. However, using Dutch data from the European Values Study 2008, hardly any significant intergenerational mobility effects are found. Maybe intergenerational mobility is not such an extraordinary experience as mobility theory would lead us to believe, or mobile individuals adjust themselves very quickly to their new situation.

Intragenerational social mobility and functional somatic symptoms in a northern Swedish context: analyses of diagonal reference models

BACKGROUND

Research indicate that social class mobility could be potentially important for health, but whether this is due to the movement itself or a result of people having been integrated in different class contexts is, to date, difficult to infer. In addition, although several theories suggest that transitions between classes in the social hierarchy can be stressful experiences, few studies have empirically examined whether such movements may have health effects, over and above the implications of "being" in these classes. In an attempt to investigate whether intragenerational social mobility is associated with functional somatic symptoms in mid-adulthood, the current study tests three partially contrasting theories.

METHOD

The dissociative theory suggests that mobility in general and upward mobility in particular may be linked to psychological distress, while the falling from grace theory indicates that downward mobility is especially stressful. In contrast, the acculturation theory holds that the health implications of social mobility is not due to the movement itself but attributed to the class contexts in which people find themselves. Diagonal Reference Models were used on a sample of 924 individuals who in 1981 graduated from 9^th grade in the municipality of Luleå, Sweden. Social mobility was operationalized as change in occupational class between age 30 and 42 (measured in 1995 and 2007). The health outcome was functional somatic symptoms at age 42, defined as a clustering self-reported physical symptoms, palpitation and sleeping difficulties during the last 12 months.

RESULTS

Overall mobility was not associated with higher levels of functional somatic symptoms compared to being immobile (p = 0.653). After controlling for prior and current class, sex, parental social position, general health, civil status, education and unemployment, the association between downward mobility was borderline significant (p = 0.055) while upward mobility was associated with lower levels of functional somatic symptoms (p = 0.03).

CONCLUSION

The current study did not find unanimous support for any of the theories. Nevertheless, it sheds light on the possibility that upward mobility may be beneficial to reduce stress-related health problems in mid-life over and above the exposure to prior and current class, while downward mobility can be of less importance for middle-age health complaints.

Investigating the effects of temporal and interpersonal relative deprivation on health in China

We argue that in addition to interpersonal relative deprivation, it is important to examine how temporal relative deprivation influences health, especially in rapidly changing societies such as China. We develop four competing hypotheses regarding the possible effects of temporal relative deprivation on health. Moreover, we propose that temporal relative deprivation may confound the health effects of interpersonal relative deprivation, and for the sake of conceptual clarity, temporal relative deprivation needs to be accounted for in the examination of interpersonal relative deprivation. We use data from a nationally representative survey in China; our analytical sample consists of 10,828 respondents. The dependent variables are self-rated health and the frequency of experiencing depressive symptoms. Interpersonal relative deprivation is measured by individuals' evaluation of their current positions on a 10-rung 'ladder'. We also assess individuals' subjective positions at 14 years of age and from 10 years ago. To measure temporal relative deprivation, current subjective status is compared with subjective status at the two time points in the past to construct indicators of perceived upward and downward mobility. Both diagonal mobility models and conventional logistic regression are used and the results from the two types of model are comparable. The majority of Chinese people felt that they moved up the social ladder compared with their parents or themselves 10 years ago. Perceived upward mobility is not associated with health outcomes, whereas perceived downward mobility, especially intra-generational, is a strong predictor of worse mental and physical health. These patterns are consistent with the argument that the effects of bad experiences are stronger and longer lasting than those of good ones. They also focus our attention on those who perceived downward mobility. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the health effects of current subjective status also include the cumulative influence of prior changes in one's social status.