Elsevier

Intelligence

Volume 33, Issue 5, September–October 2005, Pages 455-472
Intelligence

Intergenerational social mobility and mid-life status attainment: Influences of childhood intelligence, childhood social factors, and education

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2005.06.003Get rights and content

Abstract

We examined the influences of childhood social background, childhood cognitive ability, and education on intergenerational social mobility and social status attainment at midlife. The subjects were men born in 1921 and who participated in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 and thereafter in the Midspan Collaborative study in Scotland between 1970 and 1973. In logistic regression analyses, childhood cognitive ability and height were associated with upward and downward change from father's social class to participant's social class at mid-life. Education significantly influenced upward social mobility. Number of siblings had no significant effect on social mobility. These effects were also examined after adjusting for the other variables. In structural equation modelling analyses, father's social class and childhood cognitive ability influenced social status attainment at midlife, with education and occupational status in young adulthood as partially mediating factors. It was noteworthy that childhood cognitive ability related more strongly to occupation in midlife than to first occupation. These data add to the relatively few studies that track the process of status attainment in adulthood, they provide information from a new geographical setting, and they contain information from a greater proportion of the lifecourse than do most existing studies.

Introduction

The determinants of individual and group differences in social status attainment, material conditions, wealth, and other aspects of the well-being of people in adulthood are studied by psychologists, sociologists, human geographers, epidemiologists, and specialists in social medicine. This spread of disciplines signals the importance of the topic, and also the diversity of determinants and research approaches that may be applied to human social status attainment and social mobility. Adult social status is important per se, as an index of access to material things and environments, and also as an important predictor of health, with people in poorer social categories having higher morbidity and mortality (Davey Smith et al., 1998, Drever et al., 1996). Understanding the influences on adult social status is problematic. There is a correlated nexus of independent variables that are consistently found to be associated with adult outcomes but whose effects are difficult to disentangle. Mental ability, parental social class, and education all correlate significantly with individual differences in people's future social status (Blau & Duncan, 1967, Breen & Goldthorpe, 2001, Halsey et al., 1980, Jencks, 1979, Sewell & Hauser, 1975). Mental ability test scores are also well-validated predictors of future educational and occupational performance (Neisser et al., 1996, Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Using unusually informative data from a novel geographical setting, this report addresses the contributions of childhood IQ, childhood social factors, and education to social mobility and individual differences in social status attainment in middle age. A principal aim is to isolate better the role of psychometric intelligence in the causal sequence between father's and son's social positions.

An informative, early contribution to this field was the analysis of seven studies by Jencks and co-authors (Jencks, 1979). Six studies were from the USA, and one was from Sweden. For the most part, the subjects in the samples, which ranged in size from 198 to 1789, were given mental ability tests during their school years. Most of the studies ran from the 1960s to the 1970s. With a few exceptions, the final data were typically collected when subjects were in their 20s or early 30s. Adolescent ability test scores were strongly predictive of educational outcomes (standardised betas from .403 to .576), and the reduction in this bivariate association was between 12% to over 40% after controlling for multiple background variables such as parent's education, occupation and income. Adolescent ability test scores were strongly predictive of occupational status (standardised betas from .350 to .474). The reduction in this bivariate association was between 12% and about 25% after controlling for the parental background variables. There was a much larger reduction in the size of the adolescent ability–occupational status association when the subject's education was controlled, with attenuations in the effect size between 59% and 91%. However, adolescent ability was often a significant predictor of occupational status and earnings after controlling for education. Controlling first occupation in addition reduced the effect by only a further 1% to 3%. Intriguingly, the studies tended to indicate that the association between adolescent mental ability and earnings became stronger as subjects grew older. However, most of these studies ended relatively early in people's careers, and it will be useful to examine this finding further with occupational data from later in life.

Three large-scale, longitudinal studies in the USA and the UK are especially relevant to the present study and have more recently addressed the determinants of adult social status.

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 in the USA. Within the Survey, thousands of white people in the USA were tested on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) between age 14 and 22. They were followed up over 10 years later. There were significant associations between AFQT test scores and later poverty, schooling, education, marriage, welfare dependency, children's health, and crime. The effect sizes were often modest, but they were not substantially diminished after controlling for parental social class. Re-analyses of siblings in the same data set, to control for family background in the association between AFQT and life outcomes, confirmed that AFQT scores significantly predict social and economic success (Korenman & Winship, 2000). Korenman and Winship emphasised that there are important, independent contributions from education and family background to these life outcomes. In addition, they recommended that the direct and indirect (e.g., through education) effects of mental ability on life outcomes should be studied.

Analyses of the British 1946 Birth Cohort provided a path analysis of the determinants of occupational status at age 46 (Richards & Sacker, 2003). Three influences were considered: father's occupation, cognition at 8 years, and education by 26 years, in that order. Each had direct effects on occupational status at 43 years. The effect of father's occupation was partly indirect, via cognition at 8 years and education. The effect of cognition at 8 years was partly indirect, via education.

Linked to the correlates of social status is the issue of intergenerational social mobility. Previous research has asked whether the UK has a meritocratic society, i.e., one in which social status is largely achieved by merit. Merit, in this sense, is sometimes defined as IQ plus effort (Breen & Goldthorpe, 2001, Saunders, 2002, Young, 1958). Analyses of the UK's National Child Development Study (NCDS) led some to assert that social mobility in the UK takes place largely on meritocratic grounds (Saunders, 1997, Saunders, 2002), and some to disagree (Breen & Goldthorpe, 1999, Breen & Goldthorpe, 2002). The NCDS gathered birth data on all children born in Great Britain in one week in March 1958. They were followed up at ages 7, 11, 16, 23 and 33 years. They were given the General Ability Test at age 11. Breen & Goldthorpe, 1999, Breen & Goldthorpe, 2002 found that there were still substantial effects of class of origin in predicting social class at age 33 after controlling for General Ability Test scores and academic effort. Education tended to have a stronger effect of reducing the effects of class of origin. They hypothesized that the effects of mental ability on social status might substantially operate through education (Breen & Goldthorpe, 1999, Breen & Goldthorpe, 2001). Controlling for education, ability and effort in the NCDS still did not eliminate the effects of social class of origin: “children from disadvantaged class origins have to display far more merit than do children of more advantaged origins in order to attain similar class positions” (Breen & Goldthorpe, 1999, p. 21). Using the same data, Saunders (2002) found that class of origin accounted for about one quarter of the explained variance in class at age 33, whereas ability, motivation and qualifications accounted for over 60%. He concluded that Britain operated largely on a meritocratic basis and that the principal deviation from this was in the lack of children from middle class backgrounds who declined in social class as would be predicted from their ability levels.

From the studies cited above there is agreement that it is important to examine childhood ability, childhood social background, and education as contributors to adult social status. Here we examine these associations in a new setting, the west of Scotland. The time course of the present study extends that of previous reports: the childhood mental ability data were collected in 1932 and the final occupational and other social data were collected in the 1970s. As far as we are aware, this is the first study to model childhood IQ and both first and mid-life occupations in addition to education and father's status. The present study is in an especially strong position to examine the mediating effect of education between ability and occupation (Breen & Goldthorpe, 1999, Breen & Goldthorpe, 2001, Jencks, 1979), because the mental test was administered to our cohort at an age prior to individual differences in the number of years of full time education (Scottish Council for Research in Education, 1933). The study will advance methodologically from previous studies by: examining for mediating effects using structural equation modelling, with mid-life social status as a latent trait containing multiple indicators; and also examining intergenerational social mobility using logistic regression.

The present study's data are a new, enhanced version of the West of Scotland Collaborative study that has been linked to the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 (Hart, Deary et al., 2003). A previous analysis of the Collaborative study data found that height at mid-life, education, and number of siblings (used as an indicator of material circumstances in the family of origin) were related to upward and downward social mobility (Blane, Davey Smith, & Hart, 1999). Each was significant when the other two were controlled. The report was one of the few to examine these factors in relation to intergenerational social mobility. The present study adds mental ability test scores at age 11 years to the factors considered in the previous Collaborative study report (Blane et al., 1999).

We shall first examine the factors associated with whether sons move upward or downward in social class compared with their fathers: social mobility. Second, we ask what explains the variance in sons' status attainment. That is, we model the process of child-to-midlife social change by examining the mediating effect of education and first job on the influences of childhood IQ and social background.

Section snippets

Participants

The people whose lifecourse data are considered here took part in two large studies, one during childhood and the other during mid-adulthood.

During childhood, they participated in the Scottish Mental Survey 1932 (SMS1932). This was conducted under the auspices of the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) and obtained data about the psychometric intelligence of Scottish pupils (SCRE, 1933). On June 1st 1932, children born in the calendar year 1921 and attending schools in Scotland

Analyses of intergenerational social mobility

Men participating in the SMS1932 who later took part in the Collaborative study did not always end up at midlife in the same occupational social class as their father (Table 1). There was some social mobility: 45% of men were upwardly mobile, 14% were downwardly mobile and 41% were socially stable. There were social class differences in mean IQ scores, in the expected direction. Childhood IQ had a graded relationship with own social class. Men in social classes I and II had the highest

Overview of the study

Using the matched data from the combination of the Collaborative and SMS1932 datasets (Hart, Deary et al., 2003), we studied the determinants of intergenerational social mobility and social status attainment at mid-life based upon lifecourse (including childhood) factors and factors from the previous generation. The data provide information on this important question from Scotland, where it has not been studied before. Also, the data on social position stretch into people's 50s, which is rare

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department. Ian J. Deary is the recipient of a Royal Society–Wolfson Research Merit Award. We thank Lawrence Whalley and David Hole, with whom we discussed aspects of study design. We thank referees Linda Gottfredson, Joe Rodgers and Lee Anne Thompson for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

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