(But the original subject line of this mail was 'Re: Message from
'listowner''). 


Allan Reese wrote: 

> How about a statistical discussion based on:
> * UK educational attainment has risen in recent decades
> * UK social mobility has decreased in recent decades
> * education is the key to social mobility (David Cameron, 
> interview 25 June 2007).  




It's not completely clear which of the statements above are being
asserted, and which are being mocked! 

I'm sure most on this list will recognise that the issue of trends in
educational effects hinges on the distribution of educational
attainments within generations (e.g. school leaving cohorts). 

To compare, for example, with an analogy from Cricket (I know the below
isn't factually spot on, but it will do..)

The England team's one-day runs averages continue to rise
The England's team's international one-day ranking continues to fall
The England coach insists the key to one-day success is scoring runs

What a fool the coach is (that last statement _is_ intended to be mocked
- obviously, runs remain key, it's just that you must also account for
the number of other teams' runs..).  

I'm sure the poster is probably aware of all this, but stated as above,
David Cameron's conclusions are not necessarily out of step: education
could still be critical to helping individuals achieve 'social mobility'
(it would just depend on how it is directed). 

In fact, sociologists often analyse longer term trends in the effects of
education, but very rarely by standardising within the distribution of
the relevant generation (e.g. school leaving cohorts). They should - but
there are only a couple of applications that I know of that have done
this is, one being: 

Harman, J., Graham, H., Francis, B., & Inskip, H. M. (2006).
Socioeconomic gradients in smoking among young women: A British survey.
Social Science and Medicine, 63(11), 2791-2780.


Then, there's another very problematic statement in the claims above,
the assertion that social mobility has decreased in recent decades. 

I've heard this statement repeated ad nauseum over the last few years.
I've noted details of speeches were David Cameron, Tony Blair and Ruth
Kelly (when education minister) have all asserted this. I've heard
countless media commentaries on the 'collapsing' of social mobility in
Britain; even just this morning, the so-called decline in social
mobility in Britain was the subject of a 10 minute special investigation
on Radio 4.. 

All of this is important because it ignores critical but somewhat
inconvenient empirical evidence: social mobility has increased steadily
(though only very slightly) in Britain over the last 200 years, and it
continues to increase. I'm convinced of this myself, because I worked on
and off for 5 years on the analysis of social mobility trends with
colleagues, through the meta-analysis of 32 micro-social datasets - we
wrote our findings up at: 

Lambert, P. S., Prandy, K., & Bottero, W. (2007). By Slow Degrees: Two
Centuries of Social Reproduction and Mobility in Britain. Sociological
Research Online, 12(1). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/prandy.html

It's true that there is a lot of debate in sociology over social
mobility trends, but most recent publications have concluded either no
significant change in social mobility over time, or a small increase. To
my knowledge, it is only one recent group of studies, by Blanden et al
(see above for citations and discussion) which claim otherwise, that
social mobility has declined. These are very sound studies, but I'm
convinced that they are misleading about the nature of longer term
trends in social mobility, because they focus on income mobility from
very recent cohorts. These studies nevertheless have been tremendously
influential. In my view because they tell a version of events that many
like to hear for political motivations, regardless of any contrary
evidence - a salad bar model for choosing research evidence to suit your
views, perhaps on a par with other great misrepresentations of evidence
such as MMR and autism....


Paul


--
Dr Paul S. Lambert
Department of Applied Social Science (Rm 3S16) 
Stirling University 

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: email list for Radical Statistics 
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Allan Reese (Cefas)
> Sent: 25 June 2007 11:16
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Message from 'listowner'
> 
> I agree with the listowner, having deleted several messages 
> each day for the past week.  
> 
> How about a statistical discussion based on:
> * UK educational attainment has risen in recent decades
> * UK social mobility has decreased in recent decades
> * education is the key to social mobility (David Cameron, 
> interview 25 June 2007).  
> 
> 
> 

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