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3 Measurement Issues and Challenges
Pages 13-30

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From page 13...
... Workshop presentations explored changes in family structures, education, and labor markets, giving further attention to the implications of these changes for developing accurate measures to be used in a new study of social mobility.
From page 14...
... Tach cited findings of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which follows a birth cohort of children born in urban areas in the late 1990s. That study found that while a substantial number of children were born outside of marriage, more than half of them were born to parents who were cohabiting.
From page 15...
... As Tach encapsulated these findings, "There is a lot of change going on pretty rapidly." Nationally representative data again mirror this evidence. By the time children reach age 15, 75 percent of children born to cohabiting parents experience the dissolution of their parents' relationship while one-third of children born to married parents experience their parents' divorce.
From page 16...
... Tach reviewed the many ways that standard questions in earlier surveys might miss or misidentify members of contemporary families. For example, regarding cohabiting unmarried parents, Tach observed, "If you think about how these couples would be captured in our traditional mobility studies, they would either be excluded if the analysis was based on the marital status of the parents, or they would be pulled together with married parents if it was based on a child's biological relationship." An
From page 17...
... Key among these is that intergenerational correlations between children and non-resident parents are greater than zero, "but they are also weaker than they are for the resident parents and their children." As intergenerational associations between children and non-resident parents are greater than zero, then failure to include non-resident or unmarried parents in measures of social class position will bias both individual- and family-based measures of social mobility. Further, the finding presents a core puzzle of identifying "the underlying mobility process that is generating these weaker correlations.
From page 18...
... Tach noted the "great heterogeneity in the intensity and type of contact and involvement that non-resident parents have with their children." In pursuing this, Tach surmised, "Of course, I think adults will not be able to retrospectively recount their father's economic and child support payments or things like that, but they will probably be able to answer questions about how often they saw their non-resident parents at a particular point in time." Direct studies of intergenerational correlations between children and step-parents are lacking, but as with cohabiting unmarried parents, it is possible that those correlations might be weaker or different in some way for step-parents compared to married biological parents in intact families. Tach referred to data indicating that investments of resources, time, and money are very different for step-parents than they are for biological parents.
From page 19...
... Tach affirmed that this "is a really good resource for getting existing survey measures." Nonetheless, "none of these surveys do a very good job about asking about these issues for those respondents' parents." Multigenerational Networks Robert Mare of the University of California, Los Angeles, explored some related themes in his presentation, "Measuring Social Networks Beyond the Immediate Family." Mare chose first to highlight a point that he noted he has been making for several years in this context. In Mare's view, any inquiry into social mobility should approach "the relevant family forms as a subject of research itself rather than assuming always that we know whose characteristics it is that we should be correlating or associating." Thus, rather than a plea to include specific kin forms in the investigation of social mobility, Mare made a plea that "we scratch our heads as we go into any particular study," and consider that the unit of analysis in mobility studies may be created by processes related to mobility itself.
From page 20...
... Although social mobility depends on the intergenerational transmission of advantages and disadvantages, it also depends on basic demographic reproduction. Mare said he is curious about the connections between mobility and demographic effects.
From page 21...
... Education Education has also been changing in many ways over the past half century, including the types of institutions that provide it, the proliferating pathways that people follow to acquire it, and its value and impact on social mobility. These were some of the issues addressed by Chandra Muller of the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, in her presentation, "Measuring Education, Skill, and Personality." Increasing Heterogeneity Overall, increasing heterogeneity in educational experiences requires nuanced measurement of education as both an outcome of and an ingredient to social mobility.
From page 22...
... Enrollment patterns could be something that is quite telling about potential mechanisms and also will give you some information about parents supporting kids." Disrupted or unstable pathways of educational attainment could indicate "risk factors or problems, sometimes with paying for college, maybe other factors." Other characteristics of students who enroll in postsecondary institutions but do not complete a degree are that they are disproportionately non-white and from lower socioeconomic strata. Conventional indicators of educational attainment, such as degree completion, will not satisfactorily convey their educational experiences in ways that are useful for the study of social mobility.
From page 23...
... All of these have exacerbated instability in employment, occupation, and earnings, resulting in "greater turbulence over the life course." In an ever-changing economic environment, Mazumder suggested, standard measures of labor market involvement may not be adequate for "credible research on intergenerational mobility." Trends of concern to those interested in studying social mobility include income mobility and occupational mobility. Advances have been made in measuring intergenerational income mobility.
From page 24...
... In addition to occupation switching and job polarization, Mazumder highlighted mass incarceration as a third significant trend affecting labor markets. Incarceration rates, particularly of African American men, have reached such levels as to influence measures of mobility based solely on those who are active in the labor market.
From page 25...
... Administrative data might not suffice for studying occupational mobility, although records from unemployment insurance matched with data from firms could be helpful. Retrospective data from asking more detailed retrospective questions to develop thorough labor market histories could be another important source in the study of mobility.
From page 26...
... These datasets can also be matched with administrative data, such as SSA earnings records, to examine immigrant integration. Trejo noted that more information would be helpful, particularly further detail about initial and ongoing immigration status, refugee status, and legal status.
From page 27...
... Trejo noted that firstgeneration immigrants from these countries tend to have particularly low levels of education, so "it is not surprising that their kids have not completely caught up by the second generation." Perhaps these groups will catch up in the third generation -- but studying that would require data on the third generation, which involves other challenges. Third Generation: Selective Ethnic Attrition Identifying third-generation immigrants generally involves studying people born in the United States, with both parents born in the United States but who self-identify as being Asian, Hispanic, or whatever subgroup is being examined.
From page 28...
... Thus, Trejo noted, "It is their kids that are missing. In some sense, we are understating the attainment of the third generation for Hispanics because we are missing some of the kids from the advantaged families." Among Asians, the pattern appears to be the opposite, as "it is the higher educated families that are able to transmit their ethnicity or their ethnic identification to their kids." Difficulties in identifying the third generation, particularly in the face of selective ethnic attrition, may generate measurement biases that vary across national origin groups in direction as well as magnitude and distort inferences about mobility of immigrants' descendants.
From page 29...
... This includes giving campaign donations, attending campaign meetings, and doing campaign work. Offering data on political input from 1990, Brady observed that while the top quintile contributes 70 percent of campaign donations, conducts 30 percent of campaign hours worked, and casts 26 percent of votes, the lowest quintile contributes less than 1 percent of campaign donations, conducts 11 percent of campaign hours worked, and casts 14 percent of votes.
From page 30...
... . Both the direction of party identification and the intensity of political participation are relevant to Brady, as "it turns out it is the interaction of those two things that really have an impact on politics." For measuring intensity of political participation and civic engagement, Brady proposed four areas of inquiry: attitudes toward parties, the exercise of political voice via various acts, engagement in civil society, and possessing political social networks -- that is, as Brady described it, "having the ability to influence politics because you have a social network that will get you to somebody important." Brady shared questions that have been used in surveys conducted by the American National Election Studies and in CPS supplements addressing these areas of inquiry.


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