The Social Mobility of Siblings in Comparative Perspective (the SIBMOB project)
This project examines the social class mobility of siblings in more than ten countries with the hope of better understanding why some countries or more socially mobile than others.
(See summary in Danish below)
How come some siblings from the same family end up in different social class positions? This is a question that has yet to be fully answered by sociologists.
The EU-funded SIBMOB project will conduct a large-scale comparative study to review the class mobility of siblings. It will provide a novel statistical approach to analysing these family types. Specifically, it will identify how class mobility is generated and why societies differ in their class mobility patterns. It will furnish sociologists with a widely applicable statistical approach to such analysis, including describing how and explaining why they differ both within and between countries. The project will apply its novel approach to data on siblings born during the 20th century in 10 countries.
The project consists of three overall parts. In the first part, the project team will collect data from over 10 countries and merge them into a large database containing information on the mobility experiences of siblings. In the second part, the project team will develop a set of new statistical techniques for examining the social class mobility of siblings. In the third part, the project team will apply the new methods to the database to conduct a large-scale, comparative study of the social class mobility of siblings.
While sociologists studying how social class positions are passed on from parents to children emphasize the family as the basic theoretical unit of intergenerational transmission processes, the comparative literature on social class mobility has paid no attention to how and why siblings from the same family end up in the same or in different classes. Indeed, all existing class mobility studies examine the mobility of individuals, thereby neglecting the key question of how societal differences in class mobility patterns result from social processes operating at the level of families.
SIBMOB will fill this puzzling gap in the class mobility literature by developing a comprehensive approach to and conducting a large-scale comparative study of the class mobility of siblings. The project argues that insofar as we want to understand how class mobility is generated and why societies differ in their class mobility patterns, the total pattern of class mobility in a society needs to be viewed as a sum of different types of families with distinct class mobility patterns. SIBMOB offers a novel statistical approach to analyzing these family types, including describing how and explaining why they differ both within and between countries. The project hypothesizes that cross-national and temporal variation in class mobility results from institutional and sociodemographic factors affecting families’ overall mobility opportunities in a given society. In a comparative study, the project will apply its novel approach to data on siblings born during the 20th century in 10 countries to test this and related hypotheses about why countries, or different birth cohorts within countries, differ in their overall class mobility patterns.
Key outcomes of SIBMOB will be a deeper understanding of families’ role in mobility processes, a comprehensive statistical methodology with wide applicability, and new comparative evidence on class mobility that is much richer than the existing evidence.
Notice: All publications are Open Access and can be accessed via the links below.
2022
Education and Social Fluidity: A Reweighting Approach - Kristian Bernt Karlsson - Sociological Science, February 2022, open access
2023
Marginal Odds Ratios: What They Are, How to Compute Them, and Why Sociologists Might Want to Use Them - Kristian Bernt Karlson and Ben Jann - Sociological Science, April 2023
Origins of Attainment: Do Brother Correlations in Occupational Status and Income Overlap? - Kristian Bernt Karlson and Jesper Fels Birkelund - European Sociological Review, May 2023, online first
R package em: Generic EM Algorithm – Dongjie Wu - published on R Cran Server, January 2023.
How (Not) to Use Risk Ratios in Sociological Research – Kristian Bernt Karlson and Lincoln Quillian - Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, July 2023.
Working papers:
Economic Returns to Reproducing Parents’ Field of Study – Jesper Fels Birkelund – preprint at SocArXiv, June 2023.
Family Origins of Life Cycle Attainment: How Brother Correlations Overlap Over the Life Course – Kristian Bernt Karlson – preprint at SocArXiv, June 2023.
The project currently consists of Project PI Associate Professor Kristian Bernt Karlson and research postdocs Jesper Fels Birkelund and Jung In. Previous members of the team are Dongjie Wu (postdoc) and Serena Chow (research assistant). From 2024, Stephan Dochow-Sondershaus will join as postdoc.
The project’s advisory board consists of Florencia Torche (Stanford University), Carina Mood (Stockholm University), Irena Kogan (Mannheim University), Herman van der Werfhorst (Amsterdam University), Richard Breen (Oxford University), and Jacque Hagenaars (Tilburg University).
Two visiting PhD students have joined PI Kristian Bernt Karlson during the project so far: Kim Stienstra (Utrecht University) and Filippo Gioachin (University of Trento).
Projektet undersøger og sammenligner søskendes sociale mobilitsmønstre på tværs af ti lande. Formålet med projektet er at undersøge, hvorfor nogle lande er mere socialt mobile end andre med udgangspunkt i de forskellige forhold ved velfærdsstater og familier, som angiveligt påvirker mobiliteten mellem generationer i et samfund. Projektet (1) samler en række internationale forskningsdata om søskendes mobilitetsmønstre i én stor, samlet database, (2) udvikler nye metoder til at studere disse mønstre på og (3) anvender disse data og metoder i et stort empirisk studium af søskendes mobilitetsmønstre i ti lande. Du kan læse mere om projektet her. Universitsavisen har også en beskrivelse af projektet og projektets leder.
Researchers
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Funded by:
SIBMOB is funded by European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant).
Project: Social Class Mobility in Comparative Perspective: Bringing Siblings In (SIBMOB)
Period: 1/2-2021 – 31/1-2026
Contact
Kristian Bernt Karlson
Department of Sociology
Mail: kbk@soc.ku.dk
Telefon: 35 32 15 88
Upcoming
Kristian Bernt Karlson will present preliminary findings from his joint work with Jesper Birkelund on the social class mobility of siblings at Oxford University, Linköping University, and Stockholm University this autumn semester.
Awards
PI Kristian Bernt Karlson has been awarded two major career awards:
- The 2022 Raymond Boudon Award for Early Career Achievements in Sociology by the European Academy of Sociology, and he will be giving the Boudon lecture in Paris at the annual EAS meeting in September 2023.
- The 2023 Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award awarded by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology.
External researchers (scientific advisory board):
Name | Title |
---|---|
Florencia Torche | Professor at Stanford University |
Irena Kogan | Professor at University Mannheim |
Carina Mood | Professor at Stockholm University |
Jacques Hagenaars | Professor at Tilburg University |
Herman van de Werfhorst | Professor at European University Institute |
Richard Breen | Professor at University of Oxford |