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Abstract:There is a long tradition of studying the influence of parental background on educational attainment of the offspring. Recently the emphasis in this tradition has shifted to the question of what parental background is. In particular, what contributes to social background, for example parental occupational status, parental occupational class, and/or parental education? Moreover, who contributes to parental background, the mother, the father, or both? In this article we asked the question whether these different components of parental background are stable across time and across countries, or are some components more important in some countries or periods than in other countries or periods. We were able to reject the hypothesis that the contributions of the different components were constant across 29 European countries. In most of these countries we were also able to reject that these contributions were constant over time.

In this paper we present a new international measure of social stratification, the ICAMS (International Cambridge Scale). Our aim is to bring new evidence to the hypothesis that the construct that underlies measures of social stratification as different as prestige scales, socioeconomic indexes, social distance and social status scales is actually unidimensional. We evaluate the new scale according to both criterion-related and construct validity. Our analysis shows that the ICAMS is a valid indicator of social stratification, being almost as valid as International Socio-Economic Index (ISEI) in what we termed the generic, the homogamy and the social mobility models, and being better than ISEI in the cultural consumption model. The second key result is that all continuous measures we consider (ICAMS, ISEI and Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale) are indicators of the same latent dimension, which is unidimensional. This latter result is compatible with more than one explanation, hence calling for further research.

No abstract

In this paper we present a new international measure of social stratification, the ICAMS (International Cambridge Scale). Our aim is to bring new evidence to the hypothesis that the construct that underlies measures of social stratification as different as prestige scales, socioeconomic indexes, social distance and social status scales is actually unidimensional. We evaluate the new scale according to both criterion-related and construct validity. Our analysis shows that the ICAMS is a valid indicator of social stratification, being almost as valid as International SocioEconomic Index (ISEI) in what we termed the generic, the homogamy and the social mobility models, and being better than ISEI in the cultural consumption model. The second key result is that all continuous measures we consider (ICAMS, ISEI and Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale) are indicators of the same latent dimension, which is unidimensional. This latter result is compatible with more than one explanation, hence calling for further research.