There is widespread consensus amongst policy-makers and media commentators that social mobility in the UK has been ‘grinding to a halt’, or even going into reverse over recent decades. Yet the evidence underpinning this contention is, at best, weak. This is because the requirements for producing robust and accurate estimates of intergenerational social mobility are rarely met in most existing data sets. In this seminar I present findings from an ESRC funded project which make use of the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links a 1% sample of the decennial census between 1971 and 2011. We use this to estimate recent trends in social fluidity in England and Wales using occupation and earnings-based measure of socio-economic position. We also use the raising of the school leaving age that was implemented in 1972 to assess how an exogenous increase in schooling affects rates of absolute and relative mobility.
Presented by:
Patrick Sturgis (University of Southampton)
Date & time:
January 26, 2015 4:00 pm - January 26, 2015 5:30 pm
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