Multigenerational Approaches to Social Mobility. A Multifaceted Research Agenda.

Empirical research on social mobility has an arguably proud and – in the case of sociology – long tradition (Ganzeboom et al. 1991; Solon 1999; Bowles et al. 2005; Hout and DiPrete 2006; Morgan et al. 2006; Black and Devereux 2010). For decades, scholars have debated the main determinants of intergenerational mobility (e.g. Blau and Duncan 1967), its changing levels (e.g. Breen 2004), cross-national differences and their explanations (e.g. Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992; Corak 2004), and – from time to time – the theoretical underpinnings of the models used to assess it (e.g. Becker and Tomes 1986). And yet, one main assumption that has gone largely untested for all this time has been the idea that intergenerational social mobility should be measured as the similarity in socio-economic outcomes between parents and their offspring, that is, between two generations. This two-generation paradigm has most recently and forcefully been challenged by Robert Mare in his presidential address to the Population Association of America (Mare 2011). Mare notes that thanks to the preponderance of mobility research that either implicitly or explicitly assumes that the intergenerational transmission of status does not extend beyond that from parents to their children, “[i]t is likely that we have overstated intergenerational mobility [...] or, at the very least, have misunderstood the pathways through which it occurs” (ibid: pp.19–20). This special issue brings together new work from sociologists, economists, and demographers as a response to Mare’s call for more research on multigenerational mobility processes. The hope is that the issue will serve – alongside important recent and ongoing work (e.g., Warren and Hauser 1997; Sharkey and Elwert 2011; Zeng and Xie 2011; Roksa and Potter 2011; Jaeger 2012; Lindahl et al. 2012; Mare and Song 2012; Modin et al. 2012; Chan and Boliver 2013) – to significantly advance this relatively young field of research. Naturally, the contributions assembled here provide many “first ever” pieces of evidence. For instance, we did not have direct cross-nationally comparative evidence on multigenerational associations in social class (Hertel and Groh-Samberg this issue), we did not know how similar first and even second cousins were to each other (Hallsten this issue; Jaeger 2012), and we did not relate individual outcomes to their grandparents’ fertility outcomes (Fomby et al. this issue; Kolk this issue). Although the contributions assembled here provide answers to numerous new questions that have not received any prior empirical attention, they by no means address all of the new challenges brought about by a multigenerational approach. Mare did not simply suggest the addition of socio-economic indicators for grandparents and earlier ancestors to our existing empirical models, but instead argued for a much broader expansion of our view of mobility process, including a consideration of the influence of the extended family, such as non-resident contemporary kin (also see Jaeger 2012), the study of the role of social institutions in shaping multigenerational processes – which, ultimately, amounts to a call for comparative research across time and place – and, finally and perhaps most importantly, the joint consideration of demographic and mobility processes (Duncan 1966; Mare and Maralani 2006), which I also briefly discuss below. In the next section, I discuss selected aspects of this broader multigenerational research agenda in an effort to provide an overview of some of the central unanswered questions lying ahead. In the following section, I point out some of the data sources available for multigenerational research and then focus on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. I illustrate its use with a brief, original analysis of multigenerational educational mobility in the United States. The final section provides a brief summary of each contribution included here.