Intergenerational mobility has become an important topic in the field of social science. Almost all scholars study it in the same way, that is, by obtaining samples of adult individuals to compare the relationship between their social status and their parents, so this is also called "retrospective" method. However, there is an unavoidable sample problem in the core part of this method: in the retrospective sample, the parents of the respondents can not fully represent the previous generation, because not all the individuals of the previous generation have become parents, and those parents may have children at different ages.
Matthew lawrence of Mingde College in the United States and Richard Brin of Oxford University in the United Kingdom published an article entitled The Second Issue of Their Next Generation Journal of American Sociology 20 16. The influence of universities on educational reproduction (and their children after them? The influence of universities on educational reproduction adopts a prospective method to study the intergenerational reproduction of educational status in the process of family formation. The "expectation method" proposed by the author refers to paying attention to the social reproduction opportunities of the previous generation (parents), rather than the opportunities of the generation (children) who have already obtained mobility. This study first analyzes the factors that determine whether the next generation will come into being, and then analyzes the causal mechanism of the reproduction of educational status. In other words, by introducing important factors affecting family formation, including marriage and fertility variables, as an intermediary mechanism of causal path, the process of educational reproduction can be completely analyzed.
The data used in the study comes from the longitudinal survey data of Wisconsin, USA, and provides the male and female samples of 103 17 Wisconsin high school graduates. The investigation started from 1957, followed up in 1964, 1992 and 2004. The author uses the marginal structure model to estimate the causal effect, and the specific model strategies include estimating the causal effect by using the inverse processing probability weighting method, and testing the robustness of the causal conclusion under the interference of unmeasurable different levels and types of confounding factors. Causal effect is divided into direct effect and indirect effect. Direct effect refers to the influence of parents' college education on the probability of educational reproduction, and indirect effect refers to the result of how college education affects educational reproduction by affecting individual marriage and the number of children.
The research results are divided into two parts. One is the causal effect analysis of educational reproduction under the narrowest definition of fertility and intergenerational inheritance (at least one child, at least one child graduated from college); The second is the causal effect analysis of educational reproduction under the extended definition of fertility and intergenerational inheritance (many children and many children graduated from university). The results show that the conclusions of the two parts are basically the same: there is gender inequality between generations of educational status. Although men's college education has a significant positive impact on their college-graduated children, women's college education has no significant impact on whether they have college-graduated children. This discovery is explained in the later effect decomposition. The direct effect of female college education is almost offset by the indirect effect of college education, that is, the positive effect of female college education on the intergenerational inheritance of children's educational status is almost offset by the negative effect of college education on female marriage and childbirth, so the total effect is almost small and insignificant. This result is even more remarkable in the context of the increasing enrollment rate of female universities in the United States and other countries (such as China). Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the influence of family formation process on educational reproduction.
This study uses the "expectation method" to study how the inequality in the process of social reproduction is affected by the process of family formation, which deepens our understanding of the intergenerational relationship of social status. This method also has important enlightenment for us to study other intergenerational relations.
Literature sources: Lawrence Matthew e, Brin Richard. "Their children after them? The Influence of Universities on Educational Reproduction [J]. American Journal of Sociology (2): 532-572.