Abstract
Despite the dominance of a two-generation approach to the study of intergenerational social mobility, multigenerational influences that link the characteristics of kin across three or more generations may be important in some populations. These effects include direct net effects of grandparents socioeconomic characteristics on grandchildren, the effects of even more remote generations, the effects of family characteristics that bring extreme advantage or disadvantage at points in the past that are not uniformly tied to any specific past generation, a variety of demographic effects that both reweight socioeconomic distributions in successive generations and also incorporate multigenerational effects on demographic behavior itself, heterogeneous multigenerational effects in populations that contain more than one social mobility regime, and long run multigenerational effects that result from mobility-fertility interactions in population dynamics. Genealogical data from the Qing Dynasty Imperial Lineage and from population registry data for Liaoning, China over the past several centuries, as well as data from the long running US Panel Study of Income Dynamics provide concrete illustrations of these types of multigenerational processes. Multigenerational influence is much more multi-faceted than previous speculations and empirical investigations have implied.
About the speaker
Prof Robert Mare received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1977. He was faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1977 to 1998. He joined the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1998, and is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology. He was also the founding Director of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA.
Prof Mare’s areas of research expertise include social stratification, demography, and quantitative research methods, with a focus on the connection between demographic processes and social inequality. He has conducted studies on inequality in educational opportunities, social mobility, youth unemployment, socioeconomic differences in mortality, residential segregation by income and race, residential mobility, marriage markets, family structure and poverty, migration, and statistical methods.
Prof Mare received numerous awards including the American Sociological Association’s Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award, Robert Park Best Article Award and James S. Coleman Best Article Award. He is a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also the President of the Population Association of America in 2010 and of the Research Committee on Social Stratification of the International Sociological Association from 2006 to 2010.
|