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We carry out an analysis of societal variations in the process of educational attainment using a multilevel modeling strategy to assess how societal modernization, educational expansion, educational inequality, a world-wide secular trend toward greater equality of opportunity, and communist educational policies affect the dependence of educational attainment on parental status and the gender gap in educational attainment. Using data from 31 societies we define five-year school cohorts ranging from 1890-94 to 1980-84, and carry out our analysis based on the 304 "contexts" (created by crossing cohort by country) for which we have adequate data. We develop arguments as to why educational reproduction should be reduced by educational expansion but reinforced by educational inequality and as to why the level of education should increase and the gender gap diminish with societal modernization and over time, and we pose several claims regarding the impact of communism on equality of educational opportunity. Our hypotheses are generally confirmed.

BACKGROUND Previous research has shown that individuals from high-status families enter marriage later than those from low-status families. However, in many Western societies, it has become common to cohabit prior to marriage. Does this change the link between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and marriage timing? OBJECTIVE This study examines to what extent the impact of parental SES on the timing of first marriage weakens after young adults start a cohabiting union. It also examines crossnational variation in the link between parental SES and marriage timing before and after young adults cohabit and whether this variation depends on countries' position in the cohabitation transition. METHODS We apply discrete-time hazard models and meta-analytical tools using data from 20 Western countries. To examine whether the cohabitation stage of countries explains country differences, we construct a four-stage cohabitation typology. RESULTS In most countries, higher parental SES results in later entry into marriage. The impact of parental SES on marriage timing weakens considerably after young adults entered a cohabiting union. Substantial cross-national variation is found in the strength of the link between parental SES and marriage timing. However, this variation cannot be explained by the cohabitation stage countries are in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent advances, critical areas in the analysis of European migration remain underdeveloped. We have only a limited understanding of the consequences of migration for migrants and their descendants, relative to staying behind; and our insights of intergenerational transmission is limited to two generations of those living in the destination countries. These limitations stem from a paucity of studies that incorporate comparison with nonmigrants -- and return migrants -- in countries of origin and which trace processes of intergenerational transmission over multiple generations. This paper outlines the theoretical and methodological discussions in the field, design and data of the 2,000 Families study. The study comprises almost 50,000 members of migrant and non-migrant Turkish families across three family generations, living in Turkey and eight European countries. We provide indicative findings from the study, framed within a theoretical perspective of "dissimilation" from origins, and reflect on its potential for future migration research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare an open and a closed question format on occupations, using a status attainment model with multiple indicator measurement, estimated on data on father's, mother's, first and current/last occupation from 4318 men and women collected in the Netherlands between 1996 and 2004. Both question formats give a reasonably reliable and valid representation of the status attainment structure. The less expensive and less complicated closed question format turns out to have slightly better measurement qualities than the open question. However, in a Simultaneous Equations Model with Multi-Trait Multi-Method constraints, combining the two indicators leads to significant improvement of the model estimates and substantially different conclusions about status attainment in the Netherlands, in particular with respect to determinants of income. The best way to measure occupation therefore is: use both question formats at the same time and combine them in an SEM MTMMmodel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We update earlier analyses on trends in occupational class reproduction in the Netherlands since 1970. We extend published trend estimates by expanding the available database with recently (1999-2004) collected data that constitute about 30% of the new database. We also add more detail to the occupational class schema and the educational measure used in this new analysis. The conclusions about major trends are largely in line with our earlier findings. (A) The long-term trend towards more fluidity in bivariate occupational class reproduction is confirmed. Despite the visual impression that the trend levels off statistical tests do not show evidence of significant non-linearity. (B) The trend towards more fluidity holds for the two ascriptive components of the status-attainment structure, i.e., the effect of father's class on completed education and the partial effect of father's class on respondent's occupational class. (C) In contrast to previous analyses, we find evidence that the trend towards a weakening of the partial effect of education on occupational attainment has taken a turn: this relationship became considerably weaker between 1970 and 1985, but remained more or less at a constant level after 1985. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the cultural reproduction thesis proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, which posits that cultural participation in the arts is reproduced in families. Parents use their cultural participation as a method of social esteem and unconsciously train their children to see the arts as a lifestyle marker. However, delineating the affects of family life versus that of arts education in school, as contributors to cultural proclivities, has been problematic. This essay attempts to solve the methodological flaws in previous studies of this issue by using a longitudinal double context model.

The article presents the author's view on the social relevance or irrelevance of the study of sociology in the Netherlands. To present his outlook the author analyzes the dark picture drawn by certain sociologists concerning the deplorable situation of Dutch sociology, expose the ground cause of this situation and recommends suggestions to improve the prevailing state of affairs. He concludes that sociologists have an important social role in the existence of sociology as scientific discipline.

To what extent do the mother's and father's jobs and occupational sex-typing influence the status and sex-typing of their children's occupation at first entry into the labour market? Our database contains 5027 respondents of two merged Dutch surveys held between 1992 and 1995. The effect of the mother's occupational status on her daughter's is significant, but smaller than either the effect of father's status on his son's or his daughter's status. The mother's occupational sex-typing is related to her daughter's occupational sex-typing. The more female sex-typed the daughter's occupation, the lower her occupational status. In the same way the father's occupational sex-typing is related to his son's occupational sex-typing. While the extension of the classical status attainment models by the mother's occupation and occupational sex-typing leads to interesting and new coefficients, we conclude that the more elementary classical model is not invalidated by these new perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Status attainment in the Netherlands is analysed using both linear regression and multiomial logistic (MNL) regression for male labour-market cohorts between 1920 and 1990. The quasi row and columns 2 mobility model )Logan, 1983; Goodman, 1979) is included in the MNL model, and a stereotyped ordered regression model (Anderson, 1984; DiPrete, 1990) is used for the covariates. The regression analyses indicate that the effect of father's occupation becomes weaker for later entrants into the labour market and as work experience accumulates. The impact of education is not affected by entry year but only by work experience. The MNL models largely confirm the results of the regression analysis, but show that the weakening impact of father's occupation by entry year and experience is not due to an increased flow between occupational classes, but only to a reduced propensity to immobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides operational procedures for coding internationally comparable measures of occupational status from the recently published International Standard Classification of Occupation 1988 (ISCO88) of the International Labor Office (ILO, 1990). We first discuss the nature of the ISCO88 classification and its relationship to national classifications used around the world and also to its predecessor, ISCO68 (ILO, 1969), which has been widely utilized in comparative research. We argue that comparative research would gain much from adopting ISCO88 as the standard tool of classification and provide guidance on how to do this. We then outline the procedures we have used to generate new standard recodes for three internationally comparable measures of occupational status: Treiman's Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale (SIOPS), Ganzeboom et al.'s International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status (ISEI), and Erikson and Goldthorpe's class categories (EGP). To update the SIOPS prestige scores we have directly matched the occupational titles in the SIOPS scale to the categories of the ISCO88 classification. For ISEI scores we have replicated the procedure used to create scores for the ISCO68 categories, employing the same data but using newly developed matches between the underlying national occupational classifications and ISCO88. To construct the EGP class codes we have mapped the ISCO88 occupation categories into a 10-category classification developed by the CASMIN project for a 12-country analysis. To validate these scales, we estimated parameters of a basic status-attainment model from an independent source of data: the pooled file from the International Social Justice Project (a large international data file that combines data from sample surveys in 14 countries), Estimates based on occupational status scales derived from ISCO88 and ISCO68 are highly similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on analysis of intergenerational educational mobility in the Netherlands for birth cohorts from 1891 to 1960. This has resulted in the following two conclusions. First, the pattern of educational mobility can be described with a simple log-linear model, certainly when compared with the models for occupational mobility. The pattern can be summarized with an optimal scaling of the categories, a general association coefficient and a general immobility coefficient. Differences between birth cohorts can even be summarized by differences in one coefficient, namely the general association coefficient. Second, there is a clear trend towards more mobility, and this trend is linear. This conclusion, that Dutch society has become more open in the 20th century, is in line with empirical results on changes in occupational mobility and in marriage patterns. The article also describes about methods of data collection and analysis. They have brought together data from different national population surveys.

The article presents a research on cross-national comparative studies of the process of occupational attainment conducted over the past 20 years. Some support is found for the claim that industrial societies are more open than developing societies, but substantive conclusions regarding societal similarities and differences in status-attainment processes are very limited and very tentative. This unhappy state is attributed to a failure by the research community to take issues of measurement comparability seriously. A proposal is made for a collective effort to produce standardized results from individual national studies, in order to facilitate future cross-national comparative research on status-attainment processes and patterns. A number of studies have compared the status-attainment process in two or more countries. First, the article reviews these studies from the point of view of measurement comparability, to substantiate the strong claims regarding the lack of established knowledge and the reasons for it. Second, the article attempts to extract from the corpus of comparative studies some generalizations that, if not unequivocally established, might at least be regarded as provisionally supported.

The article presents information on the structure of the intergenerational transmission of social inequality in Hungary in 1982. In the theoretical part of the paper, it compares a functionalist account of the intergenerational transmission of inequality with a cultural reproduction point of view. It is argued that in socialist states, which have weakened economic inheritance by law, the cultural aspects of social inequality have extra force. It has also been argued that it is inappropriate to conceptualize social inequality in socialist societies only as socioeconomic achievement. The data provided in the article treats the intergenerational transmission of social inequality in six dimensions, next to education, occupation, and income, it also looks at region, housing, and cultural consumption. Path models suggest that the cultural dimension of social inequality functions as the main transmitter of social inequality, as expected from cultural reproduction theory. However, a cohort analysis reveals that opposite to expectations derived from cultural reproduction theory, parents' cultural resources have had a declining impact on the outcomes for offspring.

The article presents the first report on the ongoing project to compile and analyze a comprehensive new set of intergenerational mobility tables for a large number of countries. A distinctive feature of the approach is that insofar as data permits, multiple tables from each country are analyzed. Using log-multiplicative scaled association models, 149 intergenerational class mobility tables from 35 countries were analyzed and classified. The approach permits a rigorous test of the hypothesis of common social fluidity, the hypothesis of invariance in mobility regimes across countries and time. The analysis was done in two ways, by assessing the proportion of the variance in various parameters of mobility tables that lies between countries and by assessing the strength of linear trends in these parameters within countries. The between-country variance accounted for about one third of the total variance of the mobility parameters, indicating that there are significant between-country differences. The research also found that within countries the extent of inequality in mobility chances is on average decreasing at about one percent per year, in the long run a substantial rate.