This award provides support to Dr. David B. Grusky under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Awards program. The objectives of this program are to provide research support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow the investigator to pursue his research in the study of social stratification in the United States. The objective of his work is to present a systematic history of the rates, patterns, and sources of American social mobility over the last 150 years. He will construct a standardized archive of comparable unit- record data from a variety of contemporary and historical sources, and will use these data to assess the effects of long-term economic and institutional changes on the parameters of the mobility regime. The results will provide new evidence on the continuing debates over the effects of economic growth and development on (a) the demographic composition of social classes, (b) the opportunities for upward mobility among blacks and other minorities, and (c) the structure of ethnic differences in social stratification.
