Apologies for the cross posting:

Measuring social class and social mobility: recent evidence and debates. 
The Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London EC1Y 8LX 
Start Time: 29 May 2013 17:00
End Time: 29 May 2013 19:00 

The recent media coverage of the Great British Class Survey suggests debates on social stratification remains a key social issue. The two speakers will describe recent evidence around social mobility, as well as touch upon methodological issues around the measurement of social class. They will be followed by a discussant, John Goldthorpe from Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Trends in intergenerational class mobility in Britain: New findings from the analysis of Birth Cohort Data. 
Speaker: Erzsebet Bukodi, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Social mobility is now a matter of greater political concern in Britain than at any time previously. Yet the data available for the determination of mobility trends are less adequate today than two or three decades ago. It is also widely believed in political, and likewise in media, circles that social mobility is in decline. But the evidence from sociological research, focused on intergenerational class mobility, has thus far given little support to such a view. In this paper, we present results based on a newly-constructed dataset covering four birth cohorts that provides improved data for the study of trends in intergenerational class mobility and that allows analyses to move from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. These results confirm there has been no decline in intergenerational class mobility, whether considered in absolute or relative terms. In the case of women, there is in fact evidence of mobility increasing. However, the better quality and extended range of our data enable us to identify other ‘mobility problems’. Among the members of successive cohorts, the experience of upward mobility is becoming less common and that of downward mobility more common; and class-linked inequalities in relative chances of mobility and immobility appear wider than previously thought.
 
Measures of social stratification and their consequences: Occupational and non-occupational measures in the study of social stratification and mobility
Speaker: Paul Lambert, University of Stirling

It is increasingly common to see studies which address topics of social stratification and/or inter-generational social mobility, but avoid using the occupation-based measures which characterise traditional sociological approaches in this area. One example to have attracted considerable attention in the UK has been the class scheme proposed by Savage et al. (2013) based upon findings from a major survey administered through the BBC (the ‘Great British Class Survey’, hereafter ‘GBCS’). Another well-known example can be seen in the substantial impact of income-based analyses of social mobility conducted by economists. These and other examples reflect studies which embrace traditional sociological research questions, but eschew traditional sociological approaches to measurement.
In this paper we will operationalize and compare a number of occupational and non-occupational measures of stratification, commenting upon their qualities and comparing the results obtained from different measures. We will pay particular attention to the GBCS which, though it is not particularly designed for use in survey data analysis, can be estimated from rich social surveys such as the BHPS, and raises interesting questions about whether different dimensions of social circumstances – e.g. economic capital, social capital and cultural capital – can or should be incorporated into a measure of stratification. One advantage of occupation-based measures has been the ability to obtain reliable data on the occupations of important alters through survey questions – on such a basis, ‘classic’ sociological studies of social mobility compared respondents’ occupations with those of their fathers or parents. We hypothesise that the inherently temporal comparisons of stratification research, such as in studying social mobility, are less well addressed by non-occupational measures, where often it is not possible (or only possible after dramatic simplification) to operationalize a measure for an alter, and where other relationships with life-course stage raise problems of empirical comparison. 

Refreshments from 4.30pm onwards

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Meeting organised by the RSS Social Statistics Section