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Title: Intergenerational Educational Mobility and Child-Parent Responsibility: A Response to Absolute or Structural Mobility?

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2008

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Abstract: Research exploring the negative effects of intergenerational educational mobility is very common throughout the social science literature. The primary question driving this research is whether those who exceed the highest level of education attained by either of their parents have less cohesive ties with their parents than those who do not. Most of this research uses a metric of absolute mobility which directly compares the childs education to the education of their mother and father. However, if more people are receiving a college degree in the childs than in the parents generation, it is possible that the childs mobility will be viewed less as an individual achievement and more as a structural phenomenon (Kalmijn 2006). The research presented here contributes to the growing body of research on the effects of educational mobility a new metric of structural mobility (Sorensen 1977), which takes into account the changing trends in educational attainment. The overall purpose of this paper is to analyze how structural educational mobility differs from absolute mobility in its effects on child-parent relationships. I find that absolute mobility does not impact child-parent relationships significantly. However, structural mobility was found to have a negative impact on child-parent relations when an individual is upwardly-mobile. When an individual is downwardly-mobile, structural mobility has a positive impact. Therefore, the effects of structural mobility indeed are more influential than absolute mobility, but not in the ways hypothesized by Kalmijn (2006).

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Authors: Willis, Eric

Institution: Clemson University

Department: Sociology

Advisor: William Haller

Degree: Master of Science

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Family and Marriage

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