Does Intergenerational Educational Mobility Shape the Well-Being of Young Europeans? Evidence from the European Social Survey

Schuck, Bettina and Steiber, Nadia (2018) Does Intergenerational Educational Mobility Shape the Well-Being of Young Europeans? Evidence from the European Social Survey. Social Indicators Research, 139 (3). pp. 1237-1255. ISSN 0303-8300

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Abstract

Using pooled European Social Survey data (Rounds 4-7, 2008-2014), we investigate the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and subjective wellbeing (SWB) for young Europeans (N = 16,050 individuals aged 25-34 from 18 countries). Previous research has been struggling with inconclusive results due to the methodological challenge of disentangling the independent (i.e., "net") effect of social mobility over and above the effects of social origin and destination. We contribute to this line of research by contrasting mobility effects estimated in a conventional linear regression framework with net mobility effects estimated by (non-linear) diagonal mobility models (DMM). We show how model selection influences estimates of mobility effects and how different specifications lead to radically different findings. Using DMM, we estimate how intergenerational educational mobility affects the SWB of young Europeans, differentiating between downward and upward mobility and different country groups. Our results suggest that status loss/gain across generations affects young adults' SWB in addition to the level-effect of ending up in a lower/ higher status position only in Continental Europe.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This work was supported by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme, in the frame of the collaborative research project CUPESSE (Cultural Pathsways to Economic Self-Sufficiency and Entrepreneurship; Grant Agreement Number 613257).
Keywords:	Intergenerational mobility, Subjective well-being, Life satisfaction, Diagonal mobility models, Young adults, European Social Survey
Divisions:	Departments > Sozioökonomie > Sozialpolitik > Demographie > Wittgenstein Centre
Version of the Document:	Published
Depositing User:	Gertraud Novotny
Date Deposited:	13 Dec 2018 14:41
Last Modified:	15 Dec 2018 11:09
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/6739

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