Session on New Developments of Intra- and Intergenerational Social Mobility

Intergenerational mobility involves the extent to which key destinations of individuals differ from those of their parents, and intragenerational mobility concerns the movement of individuals up or down those destinations over a lifetime. Both types of mobility have potentially changed over the last few decades and vary across social settings. This session invites papers that address one or both of these mobility processes. With an explosion in the availability of individual-level public administrative data, digital historical archives, and other forms of “big data,” social scientists are now in an era of unprecedented opportunities to expand the scope traditional social mobility research. We are particularly interested in new theories, perspectives, methods, and data that allow us to better understand social mobility in a changing world. Questions may include, but are not limited to, how to better integrate different data sources through data harmonization and linkage, promote the accumulation of knowledge (e.g., the CASMIN project), bring together tools from statistics, mathematics, economics, and computer sciences, make use of theory, algorithms, mechanisms, and practices to advices RC28’s contributions to knowledge about social stratification reviewed in Michael Hout and Thomas DiPrete (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 2006).