Social structure and life chances

This paper deploys a series of arguments drawn from Rawls A Theory of Justice to demonstrate that the study of relative mobility rates implements a particular view of social justice, liberal equality. Rawls himself proposes a different view, of democratic equality in which the strongly meritocratic requirements of liberal equality are tempered by concerns with the actual conditions of life of the members of the society. It sets out, in general terms, the design of a programme of research that looks beyond issues of mobility between social positions, to consider the impact of positions on material conditions, and the reciprocal impact of conditions on subsequent positions, discussing also the theoretical basis of various of the measures that will be used in the study

Wealth: its use, level, inheritance and change: in relation to human capital

This paper investigates a number of conjectures about the relative importance of the two components of social class, wealth and human capital, through the life course. It sets out grounds for the expectation that human capital will be of more importance to social position during the earlier part of adult life, while wealth should be increasingly important during the later. The empirical part of the discussion develops a predominantly indirect estimation of wealth (by multiplying up from observed income from investments and pension funds from the British Household Panel Study), also using BHPS direct measures of housing wealth. The distribution of these two measures over the life-course (estimated cross-sectionally) conforms to the expected life-course pattern. Regression models are used to show the importance of human capital growth for the accumulation of capital through the life-course

Time budgets and time use

"Die empirischen Statistiken über Zeitverwendung bieten ein einzigartiges Werkzeug, um ein weites Spektrum von Politikanliegen zu erforschen, einschließlich sozialem Wandel, Arbeitsteilung, Zeitallokation der Hausarbeit, Schätzung des Wertes der Haushaltsproduktion, Transport, Freizeit und Erholung, Rentenpläne oder Gesundheitsprogramme. Die Autoren diskutieren in ihrem Beitrag neuere Entwicklungen und zukünftige Herausforderungen der Forschung über Zeitverwendung und Zeitbudgets und gehen dabei auf deutsche und internationale Forschungsprogramme ein, insbesondere auf die Forschungsergebnisse der "Harmonised European Time Use Study" (HETUS). Schwerpunkte ihrer Darstellung sind unter anderem neue internationale Zeitverwendungsinstitutionen, Datenarchive und Umfragen, deutsche Zeitverwendungsdaten und ihr Zugriff, aktuelle Forschungsfelder und Studien der Zeitverwendung, neue Methoden und Zeitverwendungserhebungen, zukünftige Entwicklungen sowie europäische und internationale Herausforderungen der Zeitverwendungsforschung." (ICI

Human capital and social position in Britain: creating a measure of wage-earning potential from BHPS data

This paper develops a continuously scaled indicator of social position (the Essex Score), which is estimated as individuals potential wage in the labour market. The Essex Score is designed as a tool to investigate patterns of differentiation in life chances. It is constructed based on individuals educational qualifications, recent experience in employment and non-employment, and occupational attainment using data from all the currently available 13 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. The Essex Score represents those embodied economic resources salient to individuals participation in the labour market, equivalent to human capital in economic literature, and sometimes indicated by social class categories in sociological research. It has advantages over other social class measures. Being based on educational levels and on degrees of present and past attachment to the labour market as well as on present or previous occupational membership, it covers the entire adult population irrespective of their employment status and employment history. Its continuous level measurement also allows aggregation of scores from an individual to a household level, as well as the sensitive investigation of the determinants and consequences of changes in social position during the life course

Infusing time diary evidence into panel data: an exercise in calibrating time-use estimates for the BHPS

In this paper, we calibrate a set of time use variables for a long-running panel survey (the British Household Panel Survey, BHPS, 1994 2004) from evidence derived from a smaller scale panel survey that collected time use information by both the survey method and the diary method from the same respondents (the Home On-line Study, HoL, 1999 2001). Past research has suggested that the time diary method produces more accurate and reliable measures of time use than the survey approach. The diary approach, however, usually has a low response rate and is not practicable for a large-scale panel study like the BHPS. On the other hand, direct questioning in survey interviews is a relatively flexible approach to collect time use data. We therefore propose a method to combine the strengths of the survey approach and the diary method to produce time use data. The survey part of the HoL study shares the same questionnaire-derived time-use predictor variables with the BHPS. We use regression of the predictors on the time diary data in the HoL study to calibrate time use in the BHPS by multiplying the resulting regression coefficients with the same predictor variables in the BHPS. Then we get a calibrated index of time-use patterns based on BHPS questionnaire items. The calibrated time use variables cover all major categories of daily activities and are available in Wave 4 (1994) to Wave 14 (2004) of the BHPS. They are useful resources for the study of time use practices and the life course

A new measure of social position: social mobility and human capital in Britain

This paper develops and applies the Essex Score approach to classifying life chances. This is in essence a class measure, insofar as it identifies the extent of access (of individuals and households) to those resources which determine the distribution of economic power within the society. However it consists, not of distinct categories, but of a continuous indication of human capital, constructed as a composite of education, recent work experience and occupational attainment. Its theoretical basis is straightforward; the mechanisms which connect these characteristics together, and which associate them with life-outcomes, can be simply and clearly specified. Its practical advantages include: its comprehensiveness of coverage across the population irrespective of past and present employment status; and its continuous measurement, which allows aggregation from individual to household levels of measurement, as well the sensitive investigation of the determinants and consequences of changes in social position during the life-course. The Essex Score is designed as a tool to investigate patterns of differentiation in life-chances. However the illustrative application that follows focuses more specifically on the study of social mobility. It brings together inter-generational and life-course processes in the UK into a single analysis, covering the influences of parents position, schooling, educational attainment, as well as the consequences of job performance and household or family formation processes. The Essex Score is calibrated from the British Household Panel Study, and the analyses of mobility processes are based on this same source. The work described here is part of the Social Position and Life Chances (SPLC) research project (described in Social Structure and Life Chances, ISER Working Paper 2001-20)