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Analysing Intergenerational Transmissions: From Social Mobility to Social Reproduction

Class and Stratification Analysis

ISBN: 978-1-78190-537-1, eISBN: 978-1-78190-538-8

Publication date: 30 January 2013

Abstract

Social mobility research starts conventionally from the children's generation and looks at group-specific individual life chances. However, an immediate interpretation of these results as measures of social reproduction is often misleading. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of a related but alternative approach which looks at intergenerational links from the perspective of the parents’ generation. It asks about the consequences of social inequality in this generation for the following generation(s). This includes questions of how the parental origin context is formed, whether there are any children at all and when they were born as well as the aspect of these children's relative chances of attaining particular social positions. As an empirical example, the paper describes patterns of educational reproduction in (West) Germany during the mid- and late 20th century. Simulations allow assessing the relative importance of various partial processes of social reproduction. A large proportion of the observed levels of educational reproduction can be attributed to family-related processes such as union formation. Drawing together analyses from various areas, the paper combines questions of social mobility research with a demographic perspective and broadens the analytical basis of inequality research for systematic comparative research.

Keywords

Citation

Hillmert, S. (2013), "Analysing Intergenerational Transmissions: From Social Mobility to Social Reproduction", Elisabeth Birkelund, G. (Ed.) Class and Stratification Analysis (Comparative Social Research, Vol. 30), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 131-157. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0195-6310(2013)0000030009

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited