Heterogeneous Effects of Intergenerational Social Mobility: An Improved Method and New Evidence

Luo, Liying

doi:10.1177/00031224211052028

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(144 reference statements)

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“…The effects quantified in our mobility analysis reflect combinations of the effects of the status attained through mobility and of mobility itself. Methods have been proposed to disaggregate these effects, although there remains no gold standard ( 38 ). A widely used method is the Diagonal Reference Model (DRM) first developed by Sobel ( 39 , 40 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social mobility and biological aging among older adults in the United States

Graf

Zhang

Domingue³

et al. 2022

PNAS Nexus

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Lower socioeconomic status is associated with faster biological aging, the gradual and progressive decline in system integrity that accumulates with advancing age. Efforts to promote upward social mobility may therefore extend healthy lifespan. However, recent studies suggest that upward mobility may also have biological costs related to the stresses of crossing social boundaries. We tested associations of life-course social mobility with biological aging using data from participants in the 2016 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) Venous Blood Study who provided blood-chemistry (n = 9,255) and/or DNA methylation (DNAm) data (n = 3,976). We quantified social mobility from childhood to later-life using data on childhood family characteristics, educational attainment, and wealth accumulation. We quantified biological aging using three DNA methylation “clocks” and three blood-chemistry algorithms. We observed substantial social mobility among study participants. Those who achieved upward mobility exhibited less-advanced and slower biological aging. Associations of upward mobility with less-advanced and slower aging were consistent for blood-chemistry and DNAm measures of biological aging and were similar for men and women and for Black and White Americans (Pearson-r effect-sizes ∼0.2 for blood-chemistry measures and the DNAm GrimAge clock and DunedinPoAm pace-of-aging measures; effect-sizes were smaller for the DNAm PhenoAge clock). Analysis restricted to educational mobility suggested differential effects by racial identity; mediating links between educational mobility and healthy aging may be disrupted by structural racism. In contrast, mobility producing accumulation of wealth appeared to benefit White and Black Americans equally, suggesting economic intervention to reduce wealth inequality may have potential to heal disparities in healthy aging.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social mobility and biological aging among older adults in the United States

Graf

Zhang

Domingue³

et al. 2022

PNAS Nexus

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“…First, we illustrate SME by analyzing the effect of social mobility on average fertility using data from the General Social Survey. The mobility-fertility hypothesis, positing a relationship between individual fertility and mobility status, has been extensively discussed in the literature on mobility effects (Blau and Duncan, 1967;Sobel, 1985;Luo, 2021). We reexamine this hypothesis not by asking whether mobility status affects fertility at the individual level, but by asking whether social mobility affects average fertility.…”

Section: Relevant Literature and Estimands In Causal Inferencementioning

confidence: 97%

“…The second approach to identifying the mobility effect, especially when origin and destination are specified as categorical variables, is to rely on normalizations that do not contain inherent meanings (Duncan, 1966;Hope, 1975;Luo, 2021). They use coefficients of interaction terms between social origin and social destination as mobility effects.…”

Section: Statistical and Theoretical Unidentifiability Of Individual ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With no logical way of manipulating mobility with origin and destination fixed, there is no logical identification of causal effects (Holland, 1986). Earlier methods attempted to solve the unidentifiability issue with parametric constraints on statistical models (Duncan, 1966;Hope, 1975;Sobel, 1981Sobel, , 1985Luo, 2021), but what they solve is an issue of statistical, but not theoretical, identification.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social Mobility as Causal Intervention

Wei

Xie²

2022

Preprint

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The study of mobility effects is an important subject of study for sociologists. Empirical investigations of individual mobility effects, however, have been hindered by one fundamental limitation, the unidentifiability of mobility effects when origin and destination are held constant. Given this fundamental limitation, we propose to reconceptualize mobility effects from the micro to the macro level. Instead of micro-level mobility effects, the primary focus of the past literature, we ask alternative research questions about macro-level mobility effects: what happens to the population distribution of an outcome if we manipulate the mobility regime, that is, if we alter the observed association between social origin and social destination? The proposed method bridges the macro and micro agendas in social stratification research, and has wider applications in social stratification beyond the study of mobility effects. We illustrate the method with two analyses that evaluate the impact of social mobility on average fertility and income inequality in the United States respectively.

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“…To deal with deviations from the additive model, he included interactions for long distance upward mobility and long distance downward mobility. Similarly, Luo (2022) proposed an alternative "mobility contrast model", quantifying "mobility effects" by selected combinations of origin-destination interactions.…”

Section: Duncanmentioning

confidence: 99%