Buscha, F. & Sturgis, P. (2014) BSPS Annual Conference 2014, Univ of Winchester, 8 - 10 September 2014. [ONS LS]

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Abstract:

The level of intergenerational mobility in a society is widely taken as a key barometer of its fairness and equality, outwardly signalling whether citizens achieve social and economic status through hard work and ability, or as a result of advantages bestowed upon them by their parents. As a concept social mobility has become one of the key motifs of our political epoch, with politicians of both left and right now championing it as a core policy objective (Saunders 2010). In 2011, for example, the coalition government announced its ‘social mobility strategy’ in which improving relative intergenerational mobility was specified as the government’s most important social policy objective for the parliament (Cabinet Office, 2011). In this paper we make use of the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (LS). The LS is a one per cent sample of the population of England and Wales, with individual records linked across successive censuses. The LS thus provides representative cross-sectional and longitudinal information about the population of England and Wales for the years 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011 and is thus well suited to investigate the development of social mobility over time. Our core objectives in this research project are to bring clarity and resolution to the debate over the nature of recent trends in social mobility in the UK by providing robust estimates of relative intergenerational social mobility for cohorts, in England and Wales defined by year of birth, born between 1955 and 1993 and covering the period 1981 to 2011. Our aim is to estimate and compare relative mobility rates using three different measures of socio-economic position: social class; social status; and income.

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Output from project: 0401004