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Source: Sociological Science
Resulting in 10 citations.
1. Andrade, Stefan B.
Thomsen, Jens-Peter
Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Denmark and the United States
Sociological Science published online (14 February 2018): DOI: 10.15195/v5.a5.
Also: https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v5-5-93/
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Denmark, Danish; Educational Attainment; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

An overall finding in comparative mobility studies is that intergenerational mobility is greater in Scandinavia than in liberal welfare-state countries like the United States and United Kingdom. However, in a recent study, Landersø and Heckman (L & H) (2017) argue that intergenerational educational mobility in Denmark and the United States is remarkably similar. L & H's findings run contrary to widespread beliefs and have been echoed in academia and mass media on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In this article, we reanalyze educational mobility in Denmark and the United States using the same data sources as L & H. We apply several different methodological approaches from economics and sociology, and we consistently find that educational mobility is higher in Denmark than in the United States.
Bibliography Citation
Andrade, Stefan B. and Jens-Peter Thomsen. "Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Denmark and the United States." Sociological Science published online (14 February 2018): DOI: 10.15195/v5.a5.
2. Andrade, Stefan B.
Thomsen, Jens-Peter
Yes, Denmark Is a More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States: Rejoinder to Kristian Karlson
Sociological Science published online (17 November 2021): DOI: 10.15195/v8.a18.
Also: https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v8-18-359/
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Cross-national Analysis; Denmark, Danish; Educational Attainment; General Social Survey (GSS); Mobility

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

In this rejoinder to Kristian Bernt Karlson (KBK), we maintain that there are substantial differences in intergenerational educational mobility between Denmark and the United States. In fact, when we include additional parental information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) for the United States, as suggested by KBK, the gap between Denmark and the United States increases. To confirm our findings, we show that the same conclusion about markedly higher educational mobility in Denmark holds when data from the General Social Survey are substituted for the NLSY97.
Bibliography Citation
Andrade, Stefan B. and Jens-Peter Thomsen. "Yes, Denmark Is a More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States: Rejoinder to Kristian Karlson." Sociological Science published online (17 November 2021): DOI: 10.15195/v8.a18.
3. Brand, Jennie E.
Moore, Ravaris L.
Song, Xi
Xie, Yu
Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children's Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis
Sociological Science published online (16 April 2019): DOI: 10.15195/v6.a11.
Also: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v6-11-264/
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Cognitive Ability; Depression (see also CESD); Divorce; Educational Attainment; Family Income; Parental Influences; Parental Marital Status; Pearlin Mastery Scale; Personality/Big Five Factor Model or Traits; Racial Differences; Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) (see Self-Esteem)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children's skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children's education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children's psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children's cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children's psychosocial and cognitive skills.
Bibliography Citation
Brand, Jennie E., Ravaris L. Moore, Xi Song and Yu Xie. "Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children's Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis." Sociological Science published online (16 April 2019): DOI: 10.15195/v6.a11.
4. Breen, Richard
Choi, Seongsoo
Holm, Anders
Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sample Selection Bias
Sociological Science published online (8 July 2015): DOI: 10.15195/v2.a17.
Also: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v2-17-351/
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): College Degree; Educational Returns; Heterogeneity; Selectivity Bias/Selection Bias

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The role of education in the process of socioeconomic attainment is a topic of long standing interest to sociologists and economists. Recently there has been growing interest not only in estimating the average causal effect of education on outcomes such as earnings, but also in estimating how causal effects might vary over individuals or groups. In this paper we point out one of the under-appreciated hazards of seeking to estimate heterogeneous causal effects: conventional selection bias (that is, selection on baseline differences) can easily be mistaken for heterogeneity of causal effects. This might lead us to find heterogeneous effects when the true effect is homogenous, or to wrongly estimate not only the magnitude but also the sign of heterogeneous effects. We apply a test for the robustness of heterogeneous causal effects in the face of varying degrees and patterns of selection bias, and we illustrate our arguments and our method using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data.
Bibliography Citation
Breen, Richard, Seongsoo Choi and Anders Holm. "Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sample Selection Bias." Sociological Science published online (8 July 2015): DOI: 10.15195/v2.a17.
5. Breen, Richard
Chung, Inkwan
Income Inequality and Education
Sociological Science 2 (August 2015): 454-477.
Also: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/volume-2/august/SocSci_v2_454to477.pdf
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Earnings; Educational Attainment; Income Distribution; Wage Gap

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Many commentators have seen the growing gap in earnings and income between those with a college education and those without as a major cause of increasing inequality in the United States and elsewhere. In this article we investigate the extent to which increasing the educational attainment of the US population might ameliorate inequality. We use data from NLSY79 and carry out a three-level decomposition of total inequality into within-person, between-person and between education parts. We find that the between-education contribution to inequality is small, even when we consider only adjusted inequality that omits the within-person component. We carry out a number of simulations to gauge the likely impact on inequality of changes in the distribution of education and of a narrowing of the differences in average incomes between those with different levels of education. We find that any feasible educational policy is likely to have only a minor impact on income inequality.
Bibliography Citation
Breen, Richard and Inkwan Chung. "Income Inequality and Education." Sociological Science 2 (August 2015): 454-477.
6. Doren, Catherine
Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing
Sociological Science published online (19 December 2019): DOI: 10.15195/v6.a26.
Also: https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v6-26-684/
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Age at First Birth; Educational Attainment; Fertility; Motherhood; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline--a "motherhood wage penalty." Recent scholarship suggests the penalty's magnitude differs by educational attainment. Yet education is also predictive of when women have children and how many they have, which can affect the wage penalty's size too. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and by age at births, considering how these relationships differ by education. For college graduates, first births were associated with a small wage penalty overall, but the penalty was larger for earlier first births and declined with higher ages at first birth. Women who delayed fertility until their mid-30s reaped a premium. Second and third births were associated with wage penalties. Less educated women instead faced a wage penalty at all births and delaying fertility did not minimize the penalty.
Bibliography Citation
Doren, Catherine. "Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing." Sociological Science published online (19 December 2019): DOI: 10.15195/v6.a26.
7. Hannon, Lance
DeFina, Robert
Can Incarceration Really Strip People of Racial Privilege?
Sociological Science published online (18 March 2016): DOI: 10.15195/v3.a10.
Also: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/v3-10-190/
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Incarceration/Jail; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Racial Studies

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We replicate and reexamine Saperstein and Penner's prominent 2010 study which asks whether incarceration changes the probability that an individual will be seen as black or white (regardless of the individual's phenotype). Our reexamination shows that only a small part of their empirical analysis is suitable for addressing this question (the fixed-effects estimates), and that these results are extremely fragile. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that being interviewed in jail/prison does not increase the survey respondent's likelihood of being classified as black, and avoiding incarceration during the survey period does not increase a person's chances of being seen as white. We conclude that the empirical component of Saperstein and Penner's work needs to be reconsidered and new methods for testing their thesis should be investigated. The data are provided for other researchers to explore.
Bibliography Citation
Hannon, Lance and Robert DeFina. "Can Incarceration Really Strip People of Racial Privilege?" Sociological Science published online (18 March 2016): DOI: 10.15195/v3.a10.
8. Jaeger, Mads Meier
Karlson, Kristian
Cultural Capital and Educational Inequality: A Counterfactual Analysis
Sociological Science published online (12 December 2018): DOI: 10.15195/v5.a33.
Also: https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v5-33-775/
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Mobility; Parental Influences; Socioeconomic Status (SES)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and a counterfactual approach to test the macro-level implications of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility theory. Our counterfactual analyses show that the observed socioeconomic gradient in children's educational attainment in the NLSY79 data would be smaller if cultural capital was more equally distributed between children whose parents are of low socioeconomic status (SES) and those whose parents are of high SES. They also show that hypothetically increasing cultural capital among low-SES parents would lead to a larger reduction in the socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment than reducing it among high-SES parents. These findings are consistent with cultural mobility theory (which argues that low-SES children have a higher return to cultural capital than high-SES children) but not with cultural reproduction theory (which argues that low-SES children have a lower return to cultural capital). Our analysis contributes to existing research by demonstrating that the unequal distribution of cultural capital shapes educational inequality at the macro level.
Bibliography Citation
Jaeger, Mads Meier and Kristian Karlson. "Cultural Capital and Educational Inequality: A Counterfactual Analysis." Sociological Science published online (12 December 2018): DOI: 10.15195/v5.a33.
9. Lee, Dohoon
Age Trajectories of Poverty During Childhood and High School Graduation
Sociological Science 1 (September 2014): 344-365.
Also: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-21-344/
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Birthweight; Children, Poverty; Educational Attainment; High School Completion/Graduates; High School Diploma; Life Course; Maternal Employment; Modeling, Latent Class Analysis/Latent Transition Analysis; Racial Differences; Regions; Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) (see Self-Esteem); Rotter Scale (see Locus of Control)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This article examines distinct trajectories of childhood exposure to poverty and provides estimates of their effect on high school graduation. The analysis incorporates three key insights from the life course and human capital formation literatures: (1) the temporal dimensions of exposure to poverty, that is, timing, duration, stability, and sequencing, are confounded with one another; (2) age-varying exposure to poverty not only affects, but also is affected by, other factors that vary with age; and (3) the effect of poverty trajectories is heterogeneous across racial and ethnic groups. Results from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that any extended exposures to poverty substantially lower children's odds of graduating from high school. Persistent, early, and middle-to-late childhood exposures to poverty reduce the odds of high school graduation by 77 percent, 55 percent, and 58 percent, respectively, compared to no childhood exposure to poverty. The findings thus suggest that the impact of poverty trajectories is insensitive to observed age-varying confounders. These impacts are more pronounced for white children than for black and Hispanic children.
Bibliography Citation
Lee, Dohoon. "Age Trajectories of Poverty During Childhood and High School Graduation." Sociological Science 1 (September 2014): 344-365.
10. Maralani, Vida
McKee, Douglas
Obesity Is in the Eye of the Beholder: BMI and Socioeconomic Outcomes across Cohorts
Sociological Science published online (19 April 2017): DOI: 10.15195/v4.a13.
Also: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v4-13-288
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: Sociological Science
Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Family Income; Gender Differences; Obesity; Racial Differences; Socioeconomic Factors; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty; Wages

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The biological and social costs of body mass cannot be conceptualized in the same way. Using semiparametric methods, we show that the association between body mass index (BMI) and socioeconomic outcomes such as wages, being married, and family income is distinctly shaped by gender, race, and cohort rather than being above a specific threshold of BMI. For white men, the correlation between BMI and outcomes is positive across the “normal” range of BMI and turns negative near the cusp of the overweight range, a pattern that persists across cohorts. For white women, thinner is nearly always better, a pattern that also persists across cohorts. For black men in the 1979 cohort, the association between BMI and wages is positive across the normal and overweight ranges for wages and family income and inverted U-shaped for marriage. For black women in the 1979 cohort, thinner is better for wages and marriage. By the 1997 cohort, however, the negative association between body mass and outcomes dissipates for black Americans but not for white Americans. In the social world, "too fat" is a subjective, contingent, and fluid judgment that differs depending on who is being judged, who does the judging, and the social domain.
Bibliography Citation
Maralani, Vida and Douglas McKee. "Obesity Is in the Eye of the Beholder: BMI and Socioeconomic Outcomes across Cohorts." Sociological Science published online (19 April 2017): DOI: 10.15195/v4.a13.