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Title: Occupation, Birthplace, and Race: Initial Cohort Analysis
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2001
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Abstract: Relations among occupation, birthplace, and race constitute the core information for historical studies of assimilation, inequality, and group mobility. And they have drawn the attention of historians and other social scientists for a long time. For the most part, these studies rest on cross sectional analysis comparative data drawn from slices across censuses. They compare, for example, the occupational distribution of Irish immigrants at two points in time with the distribution of native-born Americans, sometimes increasing precision by controlling for age. Valuable as these studies are, they suffer from two inadequacies. First, they assume that the age distribution of occupation within an ethnic group may be translated into life course experience. That is, for instance, for example, that over the course of 30 years workers 25 year old in 1900 would replicate the occupational distribution of 55 year olds in the same year. But much could intervene to put current young workers on an altered trajectory. Thus, without empirical evidence it is not possible to simply accept that age distributions at points in time may be reconstructed to represent the life course. The other problem is that changes in occupational distribution could reflect either growth in overall population numbers, a general shift in occupational distribution among the whole population, or the movement of an ethnic group into or out of an industry or rank. The first difficulty the transformation of census data into life course experience may be partially solved by cohort analysis. It is the subject of this paper
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Authors: Katz, Michael B.
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Publication Number: 6
Institution: America at the Millennium Project
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity
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