06.10.2023Talk by Prof. Dr. Jeylan Mortimer

The Wisconsin status attainment model has been the predominant paradigm for the study of intergenerational attainment processes for the past half century. While its central tenets, featuring the predictive power of parents’ socioeconomic status characteristics, parental encouragement of offspring educational achievement, and adolescent aspirations and plans continue to be empirically demonstrated, this presentation will consider other phenomena as potential contributors to the persistence of inequality across generations.  Inspired by a life course perspective, recent analyses of data from the longitudinal three-generation Youth Development Study (YDS) indicate the value of extending the status attainment model to include grandparental orientations and attainments, parental self-direction at work, and multiple offspring agentic psychological resources, which are found to have distinct implications through historical time.  The YDS data archive includes a cohort born in the early 1970’s that has been surveyed 20 times over three decades (1988 to 2019), from mid-adolescence to mid-life; their parents, surveyed early on; and their children, surveyed 4 times from 2009 to 2020.  

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