Summary: | We analyse levels and trends of intergenerational social class mobility
among three post-war birth cohorts in Britain, and examine how much of the
observed mobility or immobility in them could be accounted for by existing differences in educational attainment between people from different class
backgrounds. We propose for this purpose a method which quantifies associations between categorical variables when we compare groups which differ
only in the distribution of a mediating variable such as education. This is
analogous to estimation of indirect effects in causal mediation analysis, but
is here developed to define and estimate population associations of variables.
We propose estimators for these associations, which depend only on fitted
values from models for the mediator and outcome variables, and variance
estimators for them. The analysis shows that the part that differences in education play in intergenerational class mobility is by no means so dominant
as has been supposed, and that while it varies with gender and with particular
mobility transitions, it shows no tendency to change over time.
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