Social Attainment II

1
Social Attainment II

• Moving beyond the Classical Attainment Model

2
Blau and Duncan (67)Status Attainment Model

• DVpersons occupational prestige position in
  1962
• Two basic variables to describe early
  stratification position of each person 1)
  fathers educational attainment status 2)
  fathers occupational attainment status
• Two behavioral variables 1) educational level of
  the individual 2) prestige level of first job

3
Blau and Duncan (67)Status Attainment Model
(Information taken directly from Nielsens
presentation)

• Direct occupational inheritance pRsOccFsOcc is
  only .115
• Most of rFsOccROcc .405 is indirect, thru RsEd
• The major part of the total effect of RsEd on
  RsOc (.596) is independent of social origins
  (.535 vs. only .061 thru FsOc and FsEd) driven
  by RsEd residual

4
Blau and Duncan (67)Status Attainment Model
5
Critiques of the BD model

• Class-Gender Critiques (and Featherman)
• Social Psychological Critiques (and Bourdieu)
• Social Capital Modifications
• Genetic Critiques

6
Featherman and HauserBuilding on Blau and Duncan

• There treatment of manpower flows parallels Blau
  and Duncans, but makes use of log-linear
  modeling of the mobility table to describe a
  mobility regime that is free of the distributions
  of occupational origins and destinations.
• They are following a similar inductive path to
  Blau and Duncan.
• They are also building on the quasi-independence
  models of Goodman in the sense that they are
  focusing on more than just the traditional aspect
  of occupational inheritance. They want to
  uncover the patterns of immobility and exchange
  between occupational strata.

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Featherman and HauserThe Model
8
Featherman and HauserBroad results of the Model

• Large immobility at the extremes of the hierarchy
  (farm occupations and upper nonmanual jobs)
• The transitional zones surrounding the extremes
  experience homogenous chances of immobility
• Data suggest barriers to movement across class
  boundaries (hard to move between the extremes and
  the transitional zones)
• No social distance variant seems to effect
  long-distance mobility chances within the
  transitional zones
• Immobility is almost non-existent in the middle
  of the hierarchy (no evidence of class boundaries
  to chances of movement to or from skilled manual
  occupations)
• Roughly equal propensity to be moving up or down
  between occupational strata.

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Featherman and HauserImplications

• How do the results of this model differ from Blau
  and Duncans model? (329)
• What are the implications of this observed
  difference on attainment models?

10
Szelenyi and Sorensen

• Szelenyi critiques models which attempt to deal
  with the unit of stratification systems as either
  familial or individual and concludes that the
  debate is more about contextual effects than
  gender itself.

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Szelenyi Model
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The Conventional View

• The position that (1) the family rather than
  the individual forms the basic unit of
  sociological analysis, a (2) the social position
  of the family is properly indexed by the status
  of its (usually) male head (681).
• - it fails to appreciate the simple fact that
  women are entering the labor force in
  ever-increasing numbers (683)

13
The Dominance Model

• A family centered model that . . . identifies
  the class position of the family with that of the
  individual who is most highly ranked within a
  dominance hierarchy, where this hierarchy is
  established by ordering family members in terms
  of their labor force participation and work
  situation (683).
• - like the Conventional View it fails because .
  . . no single individual can possibly capture the
  total income of the family when both spouses are
  working . . . no single individual can adequately
  represent the work situations of all family
  members (684).

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The Joint Classification Model

• Classifies families in terms of the employment
  situation of both spouses, with the result thus
  being a joint classification that represents
  all possible combinations of their individual
  work statuses (684).
• - introduces a new family-based approach which
  attends to the influence of the positions of both
  spouses and is thus superior to other singular
  family member based models.

15
Marxist Models

• Classifies women with their relation to the means
  of production or as explicitly involved in
  sustaining capitalist relations of production as
  housewives (684-5)
• - women thus facilitate the exploitation of men,
  but are not themselves exploited in a classical
  Marxian sense contrary to the domestic labor
  theorists who argue that housewives are
  indirectly exploited by capital because their
  husbands are paid a family wage that reimburses
  them not only for their direct contribution to
  profit on the shopfloor, but also for the daily
  reproduction of their labor power at home (685).

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Production-Based Models

• Like the Marxist models insofar as it assigns
  employed women to a class position that reflects
  their own job but treat housewives as outside the
  labor force and therefore ignores them
• - considered as a step that stratification
  researchers use to distance themselves from the
  conventional view.

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Dual System Models

• The dual systems approach considers economic and
  sex-based inequalities simultaneously and posits
  that a healthy and strong partnership exists
  between patriarchy and capital (685). It
  incorporates women who are housewives into the
  model by formulating a domestic mode of
  production (686).
• the approach is difficult to work with because it
  is highly abstract but it does bring housewives
  into the model and is thus an improvement on
  pervious classifications (686).

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Dual System Models

• In what ways is this approach abstract? Are
  there ways to empiricize dual system models?

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Findings

• 1. Family-based models of class are especially
  difficult to evaluate, because their proponents
  sometimes fail to specify the dimensions of
  inequality that they ultimately seek to capture
  (686).
• 2. The Joint classifications model appears to
  take us in a fruitful direction, if only because
  it begins forecast the class-gender debate in the
  language of contextual effects (686). This is
  the direction Szelenyi feels is necessary to
  accurately assess the gender-class issue, it is
  illustrated in figure 2 (687).
• 3. We need to rethink the debate as pertaining
  not so much to the woman problem as to the
  strength of contextual effects, especially those
  embedded in the family (686).

20
Question?

• Szelenyi says, I doubt that much headway can be
  made in the gender-class debate without
  operationalizing the model (686). How could we
  operationalize Szelenyis contextual model of
  class identification? (below)

21
Sorensen

• . . . a replacement of the conventional
  approach to determining the familys class
  position will make it possible to address many
  questions that are central to our understanding
  of the class position of families (45)
• Sorensen reviews studies on voting behavior and
  social mobility to evaluate the conventional, or
  classical, view of stratification in which the
  male head of the household is used to determine
  the familys social class.

22
Findings

• - With regard to voting behavior most studies
  support the conventional view, however, Sorensen
  finds that such a conclusion can easily lead to
  different conclusions regarding the performance
  for the conventional approach, and, that . . .
  it is not clear what a rejection of the
  conventional view means (36)
• - Research on intergenerational mobility has
  also shown that the conventional analysis of
  male-only tables to represent the whole
  population underestimates the degree of openness
  in the mobility regime (45)

23
Findings and Questions

• - While there is general support for the
  conventional approach, there remains uncertainty
  with regard to womens employment and class.
  Empirical evidence of womens employment and its
  relation to class is required to explain
  inadequacies of the conventional view.
• - Do you think that studies in Sorensens article
  should be interpreted as supporting the continued
  use of the conventional view or as highlights of
  the small, but significant, inadequacies of it?

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Sewell, Haller, and PortesMain Critiques of BD

• Needed to include explanation of mental ability
  that was present in the literature
• Omitted all social psychological factors which
  may have mediated the influence of the input
  variables on attainment
• Fail to explicitly state why there should be any
  observed connection between the input factors and
  the dependent variable
• Did not address opportunities to change the
  attainment behaviors of persons
• Inclusion of social psychological variables will
  better explain the variance in the dependent
  variables
• 
  
• Sewells Goal To link stratification and
  mental ability inputs through a set of social
  psychological and behavioral mechanisms to
  educational and occupational attainments. (411)

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Sewell, Haller, and PortesHypotheses

• Initial stratification position and mental
  ability affect both the type of SOI bearing on
  the youth and the youths personal observations
  of his ability
• SOI and self-assessed ability affect levels of
  educational and occupational aspiration
• Levels of aspiration affect levels of educational
  attainment
• Education affects levels of occupational
  attainment

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Sewell, Haller, and PortesSocial Psychological
Model
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Sewell, Haller, and PortesImportant
Methodological Points

• Their sampling frame was Wisconsin high school
  seniors who a) had completed both the 57 and
  64 survey, b) were males, c) whose fathers were
  farmers in 57.
• - What are the implications of this sampling
  frame on their results? - Can their results
  be compared to Blau and Duncan?

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Sewell, Haller, and PortesResults and Questions

• They find that, There is a pair of perhaps
  consequential direct paths from academic
  performance to educational aspiration and to
  educational attainment. (416)
• - What does this finding suggest?
• They offer no speculation for the finding that
  there is an unexpected path between mental
  ability and level of occupational aspiration.
• - Does this suggest anything? What might be a
• possible explanation using what we know from
  other studies we have read?

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MacLeodMain Arguments

• Makes an analytical distinction between
  aspirations and expectations. (422)
• - What is this difference?
• - Which does the author believe takes primacy?
• MacLeod speculates that the immediate social
  world influences actors in different ways
  (differences between Hallway Hangers and The
  Brothers)

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MacLeodFindings

• Hallway Hangers
• ..Own job experiences as well as those of family
  members have contributed to a deeply entrenched
  cynicism about their futures (422).
• Work is important to them only as a means to an
  end namely money.
• Evaluation of the opportunity structure plays the
  dominant role.
• Tend to blame others for their failures, not
  themselves.
• The Brothers
• Do not hesitate to name their occupational goals,
  but may mask them to prevent ridicule.
• Tend to blame their failures on personal
  inadequacy
• View their opportunity structure as open

31
MacLeodThe Theory of Social Reproduction

• MacLeod interprets and applies Bourdieus concept
  of habitus as consitutive of factors such as
  ethnicity, educational history, peer
  associations, and demographic characteristics.
• - While finding it theoretically useful,
  MacLeod sees limitations to the use of the
  habitus. What are some of these limitations?
  How does he apply it? (430-432)

32
MacLeodAdditional Questions

• Neither group has been very successful in
  achieving occupational mobility.
• - What does this imply about the importance of
  (or lack thereof) social psychological
  influences on occupational mobility? Would
  MacLeod argue that structure takes primacy over
  social psychology.

33
Bourdieu

• . . . the spaces defined by preferences in food,
  clothing or cosmetics are organized according to
  the same fundamental structure, that of the
  social space determined by volume and composition
  of capital
• Fully to construct the space of life-styles
  within which cultural practices are defines, one
  would first have to establish, for each class and
  class fraction, that is, for each other
  configurations of capital, the generative formula
  of the habitus which retranslates the necessities
  and facilities characteristic of that class of
  (relatively) homogeneous conditions of existence
  into a particular life-style. One would then
  have to determine how the dispositions of the
  habitus are specified, for each of the major
  areas of practice, by implementing one of the
  stylistic possibles offered by each field (the
  field of sport, or music, or food, decoration,
  politics, language, ect.) (522)

34
Bourdieu

• There is a direct relationship between possession
  of quantities of types of capital and the
  cultural expression of social class.
• The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the
  basis of an alchemy which transforms the
  distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a
  power relation, into a system of perceived
  differences, distinctive properties, that is, a
  distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate
  capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized
  (504).

35
Bourdieu

• Taste, the propensity and capacity to
  appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given
  class of classified, classifying objects or
  practices, is the generative formula of
  life-style, a unitary set of distinctive
  preferences which express the same expressive
  intention in the specific logic of each of the
  symbolic subspaces, furniture, clothing, language
  or body hexis (504).

36
Bourdieu

• This classificatory system, which is the product
  of the internalization of the structure of social
  space, the form in which it impinges through the
  experience of a particular position in that
  space, is, within the limits of economic
  possibilities and impossibilities (which it tends
  to reproduce in its own logic), the generator of
  practices adjusted to the regularities inherent
  in a condition (505).

37
Granovetter, Lin and Burt

• Granovetter
• - whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger
  number of people, and traverse greater social
  distance . . .when passed through weak ties
  rather than strong (450).
• To derive implications for large networks of
  relations, it is necessary to frame the basic
  hypothesis more precisely . . . by investigating
  the possible triads consisting of strong, weak,
  or absent ties among A, B, and any arbitrarily
  chosen friend of either or both (448).

38
Granovetter

• except under unlikely conditions, no strong tie
  is a bridge . . . A strong tie can be a bridge,
  therefore, only if neither party to it has any
  other strong ties . . . Weak ties suffer no such
  restriction, though they are certainly not
  automatically bridges . . . all bridges are weak
  ties (448)
• The significance of weak ties, therefore, would
  be that those which are local bridges create
  more, and shorter, paths assuming Davis (449).
• Do you think that such network effects account
  for some of the error in Blau and Duncans work?
  If so, how?

39
Lin

• The emergence of a theory of social resources
  where individuals are best served in actions
  involving status attainment to seek contacts with
  those high up on the social network hierarchy.
  Nan deducts this theory from Granovettter, Blau
  Duncan and Lin, Dayton, Greenwald. (452).

40
Lins Theory

• The macro-social structure consists of
  positions ranked according to certain normatively
  valued resources such as wealth, status, and
  power.
• The structure has a pyramidal shape in terms of
  accessibility and control of such resources. The
  higher the position, the fewer the occupants and
  the higher the position, the better the view it
  has of the structure.
• For instrumental actions (attaining status in the
  social structure being one prime example), the
  better strategy would be for ego to reach toward
  contacts higher up in the hierarchy. These
  contacts would be better able to exert influence
  on positions whose actions may benefit egos
  interest.
• This reaching-up process may be facilitated if
  ego uses weaker ties, because weaker ties are
  more likely to reach out vertically rather than
  horizontally relative to egos position in the
  hierarchy (452-3)

41
Burt

• - Managers with more social capital get higher
  returns to their human capital because they are
  positioned to identify and develop more rewarding
  opportunities (454).
• - Uses structural hole theory to connect social
  capital and social network location to explain
  how managers with more social capital get higher
  returns on their human capital because they are
  positioned to identify and develop more rewarding
  opportunities (454).

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Findings

• - Managers with contact networks rich in
  structural holes know about, have a hand in, and
  exercise control over the more rewarding
  opportunities . . . Mangers with networks rich in
  structural holes operate somewhere between the
  force of corporate authority and the dexterity of
  markets, building bridges between disconnected
  parts of the firm where it is valuable to do so
  ( 457).

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Questions

• How might this finding relate to those of Blau
  and Duncan?
• What does this suggest about strategies which
  determine how people might attempt to gain social
  capital?

44
Scarr and WeinbergGenetic Influences on
Attainment

• To prevent conflation of genetic and
  environmental influences, the authors use
  adoptive and biological families controlling for
  selection bias in adoptive parents.
• To the left is the breakdown of the families
  recruited. Thinking back to the article, are
  there any concerns with external validity?

45
Scarr and WeinbergPreliminary Observations

• Family distributions of IQ, SES, and mean age of
  children comparable for both adoptive and
  biological groups.
• There were significant sex differences in tests,
  but this is not a concern because of the
  approximately equal amount of males and females.
• No significant demographic differences in
  adoptive and biological families for this study
  (679)
• Parental IQ scores were correlated with family
  demographic characteristics.
• Adoptive families have slightly fewer children
  than biological families.
• Family size is unrelated to IQ in adoptive
  families, but slightly negatively correlated for
  biological families.
• - What is their reasoning for this?
• Later born or adopted children have a negatively
  correlated IQ scores.

46
Scarr and WeinbergFindings (1)

• The authors choose to focus on the R-squares of
  the models as opposed to the coefficients of
  individual variables.
• - What is the advantage to doing this?
• They find that when IQ scores for parents are
  added in, the R-square of the biological families
  increases to .309 while the R-square of the
  adoptive families only increased to .075. They
  claim the difference in increase can be
  attributed to the genetic contribution of the
  biological parent IQ (682)
• The R-squares for the adoptive models do improve
  when educational information is added on the
  biological mother of the adopted child,
  confirming the above result.
• This late-adolescent study confirms the results
  of earlier childhood studies, thus adding more
  evidence to the biological argument.

47
Scarr and WeinbergFindings (2)

• While the authors provide some evidence for
  inheritable traits, they continue on to claim
  that it seems evident to us that the study of
  adoptive and biological families provides
  extensive support for the idea that half or more
  of the long-term effects of family background
  on childrens intellectual attainment depend upon
  genetic, not environmental, transmission. (686)
  
• - Do they perhaps overstate themselves here, or
  does their argument support this stronger
  assertion?

48
NielsenBehavior Genetic Model

• Behavior genetic models improve upon earlier
  attainment models by separating a measurable
  trait into 3 components 1) genetic inheritance
  (affects both siblings in accordance to their
  proportion of shared genes), 2) common
  environment (SES, ethnic culture, neighborhood,
  etc.), 3) specific environment (birth order, a
  disease that only affects one child, etc.).
• This division allows a clearer distinction to be
  made between achievement and ascription.
• Nielsens model is looking at school achievement
  among adolescents

49
NielsenMethodology

• Uses AddHealth data and examines siblings living
  in the same household who are related/not related
  as MZ, DZ, FS, HS, CO, and NR.
• Sampling Frame only included blacks and
  non-Hispanic whites to control for
  second-language influences.
• Controlled for race and sex differences in verbal
  scores

50
NielsenThe Model
51
NielsenResults

• Nielsen finds that the association between GPA
  and VIQ is largely explained by genetic factors.
• The findings suggest that the three measures of
  schooling are highly heritable, strongly affected
  by specific environmental factors, and unaffected
  by common environmental factors.

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NielsenGeneralizability

• Behavior genetics requires that heritability,
  environmentality, and specificity are not fixed
  properties but vary depending upon the empirical
  context.
• THUS, to use the behavior genetic approach as a
  tool for comparative stratification research
  means finding comparable heritability and
  enivronmentality estimates for school or
  occupational outcomes in different social systems.