This research project will develop new statistical models for estimating the effects of social mobility. Downward social mobility, or the movement of an individual from an advantaged to a disadvantaged socioeconomic position, is an increasingly common experience. Downward mobility is hypothesized to lead to undesirable outcomes, such as deteriorating mental health, increased violence, and early mortality. Due to limitations of existing methods, valid empirical evidence has been lacking on the effects of social mobility for a wide variety of policy-relevant outcomes. This project will address the methodological weaknesses of existing scientific work on social mobility. Using existing data from two NSF-supported studies, the investigators also will examine the individual-level consequences of social mobility. The empirical application of the approaches developed in this project will provide training opportunities for graduate students. A user-friendly software package and an open-access online tool will be developed to increase access to and use of the newly developed methods by researchers, policymakers, and analysts.
This research project will develop a new approach to partially identify the effect of social mobility net of the effects of origin and destination. By developing new techniques to disentangle the effects of social mobility from the consequences of socioeconomic position, the project will provide insights on how researchers can obtain reliable estimates from statistical models applied to rank-deficient or high-dimensional data. The new methods will be applied to data from the General Social Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Investigators will examine the effects of mobility experiences on individuals' well-being (such as perceived happiness and stress), attitudes (such as social trust and out-group bias), and behaviors (such as marriage and fertility). The newly developed methods also will be readily applicable to other substantive applications in which linear dependency problems exist.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
