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AbstractScholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers' life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near‐perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within‐family processes.

Nyere forskning i social ulighed i uddannelse viser, at den sociale baggrund
sætter sig igennem unges uddannelsesvalg ud over de faglige meritter, som
man i demokratiske samfund typisk ser som nøglen til at bryde den sociale
arv. Artiklen belyser årsagerne bag denne regularitet ved at undersøge klasseforskelle
i unges forventninger til deres uddannelsesmæssige fremtid for to
kohorter af danske unge, der står foran deres første uddannelsesvalg, i henholdsvis
1968 og 2011. Artiklen tester en hypotese om, at sociale skævheder i
unges uddannelsesforventninger drives af én i familien rodfæstet præference
for fastholdelse af sociale privilegier over generationer. Den empiriske analyse
støtter hypotesen og viser samtidig, at de sociale skævheder i unges uddannelsesforventninger
stort set er uforandrede over de godt 40 år, der adskiller
de to kohorter. Yderligere analyser, der inddrager forældres forventninger til
den unge samt bedsteforældrenes uddannelsesniveau, støtter endvidere hypotesen.
Analysens resultater peger i retning af, at forskningen med fordel
kan rette blikket mod forventningsdannelsesprocesser i familien, hvis den vil
forstå, hvorfor den sociale arv kan være svær at bryde.


ENGELSK ABSTRACT:

Kristian Bernt Karlson: A Taste for Reproduction? Social Class Differences in Danish Adolescents' Educational Expectations in 1968 and in 2011

Recent research in educational stratification shows that social class background
affects schooling decisions among equally talented students. Class
inequalities in educational attainment therefore appear to have causes other
than the unequal distribution of academic merits, merits that usually are taken
to be the main vehicle of social mobility in Western democracies. This
article investigates the potential mechanisms behind this unequal distribution
by examining class differences in educational expectations among Danish
adolescents in 1968 and 2011. The paper tests the hypothesis that class differences
in educational expectations are caused by a preference for maintaining
social privileges over generations, a preference rooted in bosom of the family.
The empirical analysis supports the hypotheses. It shows that class differences
in expectations among equally talented students have been remarkably
stable over the four decades separating the two cohorts. Further analyses that
include information on parents' expectation for the adolescent and on the
educational attainment of grandparents provide additional support for the
hypothesis. The paper argues that future research in educational stratification
would benefit from focusing on expectation processes located in the family, if
it is to fully grasp why class differences in educational attainment appears so
persistent even today.

Keywords: inequality of opportunity, education, social class, expectations,
aspirations.

Abstract
We study the overlap in the overall impact of family background on two widely studied labour market outcomes by considering whether brother similarities in occupational status are rooted in the same underlying family characteristics that affect brother similarities in income. We extend previous research using sibling correlations as an omnibus measure of total family background impact on a given outcome by directly quantifying how brother correlations in occupational status and income overlap. We apply a novel variance components model to data from Denmark and the United States, two countries known to follow a contradictory pattern: While income mobility is much lower in the United States, occupational mobility is virtually similar. Apart from confirming this pattern, we find a substantial overlap, around 70 per cent, in brother similarities in income and occupational status in both countries. Conventional family background variables account for less than one-fifth of this overlap in each country, suggesting that shared family origins of attainment in these two domains are constituted by largely unknown family characteristics. We speculate what these characteristics might be.

Methods textbooks in sociology and other social sciences routinely recommend the use of the logit or probit model when an outcome variable is binary, an ordered logit or ordered probit when it is ordinal, and a multinomial logit when it has more than two categories. But these methodological guidelines take little or no account of a body of work that, over the past 30 years, has pointed to problematic aspects of these nonlinear probability models and, particularly, to difficulties in interpreting their parameters. In this review, we draw on that literature to explain the problems, show how they manifest themselves in research, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives that have been suggested, and point to lines of further analysis.

Although the parameters of logit and probit and other nonlinear probability models (NLPMs) are often explained and interpreted in relation to the regression coefficients of an underlying linear latent variable model, we argue that they may also be usefully interpreted in terms of the correlations between the dependent variable of the latent variable model and its predictor variables. We show how this correlation can be derived from the parameters of NLPMs, develop tests for the statistical significance of the derived correlation, and illustrate its usefulness in two applications. Under certain circumstances, which we explain, the derived correlation provides a way of overcoming the problems inherent in cross-sample comparisons of the parameters of NLPMs.

This article presents a method for estimating and interpreting total, direct, and indirect effects in logit or probit models. The method extends the decomposition properties of linear models to these models; it closes the much-discussed gap between results based on the "difference in coefficients" method and the "product of coefficients" method in mediation analysis involving nonlinear probability models models; it reports effects measured on both the logit or probit scale and the probability scale; and it identifies causal mediation effects under the sequential ignorability assumption. We also show that while our method is computationally simpler than other methods, it always performs as well as, or better than, these methods. Further derivations suggest a hitherto unrecognized issue in identifying heterogeneous mediation effects in nonlinear probability models. We conclude the article with an application of our method to data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988.

Logit and probit models are widely used in empirical sociological research. However, the common practice of comparing the coefficients of a given variable across differently specified models fitted to the same sample does not warrant the same interpretation in logits and probits as in linear regression. Unlike linear models, the change in the coefficient of the variable of interest cannot be straightforwardly attributed to the inclusion of confounding variables. The reason for this is that the variance of the underlying latent variable is not identified and will differ between models. We refer to this as the problem of rescaling. We propose a solution that allows researchers to assess the influence of confounding relative to the influence of rescaling, and we develop a test to assess the statistical significance of confounding. A further problem in making comparisons is that, in most cases, the error distribution, and not just its variance, will differ across models. Monte Carlo analyses indicate that other methods that have been proposed for dealing with the rescaling problem can lead to mistaken inferences if the error distributions are very different. In contrast, in all scenarios studied, our approach performs as least as well as, and in some cases better than, others when faced with differences in the error distributions. We present an example of our method using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study.

I denne artikel analyserer vi sammenhængen mellem økonomisk, kulturel og social kapital inden for og mellem to generationer af danskere født omkring 1930 og 1954. Vi analyserer data fra Ungdomsforløbsundersøgelsen og benytter konfirmativ faktoranalyse til at konstruere latente variable for de tre kapitalformer i begge generationer. Analysen viser, for det første, at der i begge generationer er en markant sammenhæng mellem respondenternes beholdning af økonomisk, kulturel og social kapital, og at dette mønster gælder for begge generationer. Med andre ord: Materielle og immaterielle ressourcer er stærkt sammenvævede i det danske samfund. For det andet viser analysen, at de relative beholdninger af de tre kapitalformer i høj grad "nedarves" fra forældre til børn. Med andre ord: Der er en stærk social arv af både materielle og immaterielle ressourcer.

Søgeord: Økonomisk kapital, kulturel kapital, social kapital, Bourdieu, social reproduktion, konfirmativ faktoranalyse.

ENGELSK ABSTRACT:

Kristian Bernt Karlson and Mads Meier Jæger: Coffers, Culture and Contacts: Economic, Cultural and Social Capital in Two Generations

This paper analyzes the distribution of economic, cultural, and social capital within and between two generations of Danes born around 1930 and 1954. We analyze data from the Danish Longitudinal Survey of Youth and use confirmatory factor analysis to construct latent variables which capture the different types of capital in both generations. Our analysis shows that, first, within each generation there is a strong correlation between the different types of capital. This result indicates a close relationship between economic and non-economic resources in Denmark. Second, we find high intergenerational correlations between the amount of economic, cultural, and social capital possessed by parents and children. This result indicates a surprisingly high degree of intergenerational capital transmission.

Key words: Economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, Bourdieu, social reproduction, confirmatory factor analysis.

Although most studies of the transition from school to work take a snapshot perspective in examining economic returns to education, such returns evolve over an individual's lifetime. We empirically test a theoretical formulation derived from the cumulative advantage mechanism about enduring life-cycle effects of educational mobility on income. We analyse income trajectories for all Danes born in 1960–1961, and we consider how the welfare state may counteract certain mechanisms of intergenerational transmission that give children with college-educated parents better opportunities in the labour market. We find only small direct effects of parental college attainment on earnings trajectories after we control for offspring college attainment. Thus, schooling acts as a powerful and enduring economic leveller of family background effects in Denmark. Our analyses also show direct effects on trajectories in property income derived from wealth, suggesting that the welfare state has a harder time equalising income from wealth than from earnings.