Social Mobility as Causal Intervention

Abstract

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.

Intergenerational Social Mobility and Allostatic Load in Midlife and Older Ages: A Diagonal Reference Modeling Approach

“…The primary limitation of the current study is that the analyses are cross-sectional, and causal relationships cannot be assessed. Indeed, any causal effect of intergenerational social mobility would be difficult to establish, as there is no counterfactual understanding of mobility effects ( Wei & Xie, 2022 ). When comparing individuals with the same origin and destination SEP, mobility can only go in one direction, a world in which it would go into a different direction is not conceivable.…”