Growing up in the 1990s: Tracks and trajectories of the ‘Rising 16's’: A longitudinal analysis using the British Household Panel Survey.

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

Imported on 2024-06-26 11:23

⭐ Important

• & The reproduction of social inequality over time is a longstanding issue but remains a highly important and relevant concern in contemporary sociology (Breen 2004;Devine 2004;Glass 1954;Goldthorpe & Jackson 2007;Goldthorpe, Llewellyn, & Payne 1980;Saunders 2010;Sorokin 1927). (p. 14)
• & There are various approaches with which to frame our view of stratification. To the relational or social interaction approach, the process of ‘differential association’ is key. It is written that differential association ‘acts as a conservative force on the distribution of opportunities and resources, circulating them within groups rather than across them’ (Bottero 2005: 4). So it describes the likelihood of social interaction for individuals or their ‘distance’ in the social space. (p. 22)
• & The focus of the Cambridge Scale (a measure of stratification position formulated by the group) is on the social structures defined by ‘interaction patterns’ of friendship and marriage (Bottero 2005). (p. 23)
• & An alternative approach which also falls under the umbrella of culturalist or relational approaches is that popularised by Bourdieu. His approach is seen as the most widely known in the relational tradition (Bottero 2005) (p. 23)
• & Contrasting approaches to understanding social stratification are often termed ‘structural’. This term can be explained as defining a set of classes or status groups using structural criteria, and then looking at patterns between them (Prandy 1999). The relational and structural approaches differ in terms of their view of stratification. Structurally, socially distant individuals can be very different to one another due to objective criteria linked to economic and employment circumstances; relationally, this is interpreted as rarely associating with one another (Bottero 2005). This is relevant for the present research on young people, when economic activity categorisation may not be appropriate. Those using the structural approach see the different locations of people to be within an external structure of stratification. There is also a focus on one aspect of an individual’s position, commonly economic. (p. 24)
• & A central pillar of the individualisation thesis is the concept of ‘detraditionalisation’. The traditional markers (for example, gender, ethnicity, social class background) are seen as less significant influences and, Beck argues, have made way for the influences of modern institutions such as the labour market and the welfare state (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002). (p. 26)
• & The other side of the argument follows that there remains persistent inequality; people may be making choices but outcomes are still affected by traditional background factors. MacDonald (2009) states that ‘a career may be a middle-class expectation’ (173) and that in reality the labour market is far more precarious. In his opinion, the routes young people take are characterised by transience; something this research aims to capture by focusing on ‘process’ rather than origin to destination. (p. 26)
• Good quote to use:
  • & Viewed through the perspective of Atkinson (2007a), Beck’s argument follows: ‘The changing logic of distribution and more importantly, the individualisation of social processes in reflexive (p. 26)
• & modernity have killed off the concept of social class and rendered the analysis of its effects a flawed endeavour’ (Atkinson 2007a: 1). (p. 27)
• & Beck states that the main argument is that class analysis is no longer relevant; ‘risk societies are not class societies’ (Beck 1992:36). He advances that, everyone faces hazards; the rich and powerful are not protected as inequality affects all. (p. 27)
• & Goldthorpe suggests that qualifications are becoming less valuable in current markets (Goldthorpe & Jackson 2007) which also chimes with Brown and (p. 28)
• & Hesketh’s assertion that the greater competition in the labour market deems a university degree less desirable in terms of reaching a high position once entering employment (Brown & Hesketh 2004). (p. 29)
• & Individualization ‘[i]s not simply a subjective phenomenon concerning self-identities and attitudes alone, but a structural phenomenon transfiguring objective life situations and biographies’ (Atkinson 2007a: 353). This appears to be the key misunderstanding of the concept itself. Rather than falling on the ‘agency’ side of the so-called structure and agency dualism as often argued (e.g. Evans 2007), Beck recognizes the influence of structural factors and clarifies his interpretation of this at frequent points; his position proposes that although it may seem traditional ways of life and their influences on individual choice are breaking down, there are new ways in (p. 29)
• & which inequality ‘displays a surprising stability’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 30). (p. 30)
• TRUE:
  • & Atkinson argues against Beck that upward mobility means an end to ‘class’; he states that although the expansion of higher education and continued ‘widening participation’ scheme in the UK, whilst still only recruiting a minority of poorer youth (whatever measure of class one wants to use), have provided fertile areas for investigating the persistent and pernicious operations of class’ (Atkinson 2007b) (p. 31)
• & The most dramatic of the economic changes was the virtual collapse of the youth labour market in the early 1980s. (p. 56)
• & The growing levels of youth unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s are well documented (Casson 1979; Jackson 1985; Gallie and Marsh 1994) (p. 56)
• & The decline of traditional labour market opportunities for young adults largely took place in the 1980s. By contrast, the 1990s was a decade of (p. 57)
• & employment growth in the UK (DfEE 2000) (p. 58)
• & The Education Reform Act 1988 is often regarded as the most important single piece of post-war education legislation. This legislation led to rapid changes in the curriculum, organisation, management and financing of schools (Spence 1993). An important change for pupils was the introduction of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) (Department of Education 1985; Mobley et al. 1986; North 1987). This was a radical change. A new grading scheme was established and nearly all school pupils were entered for this new common set of examinations. There were also changes in the nature and format of examinations and assessment by coursework was introduced (Ashford, Gray and Tranmer 1993). (p. 58)
• & In addition to the changes in academic education, a new apprenticeship initiative called ‘Modern Apprenticeships’ was established in order to enhance the technical and vocational skills of young workers (Saunders et al. 1997; Ainley and Rainbird 1999). Young people were now eligible for new, nationally recognised, vocational qualifications (Smithers 1999). These opportunities had the potential to influence the decisions that (p. 58)
• & young people made as they approached the end of compulsory education, although they were not exclusively targeted at minimum age school leavers (p. 59)
• & Concomitantly, Breen (1995) stresses the ‘temporal dimension of social class’: that is, that the ‘relative sizes of social classes can change over time which is described as structural change; simultaneously ‘the nature of classes themselves can change over time’ (whether a certain occupation, such as clerk, is comparable in 1920 to the same occupation in 2000); as so ‘the consequences and corollaries of class membership can also shift over time’ (p. 61)
• & (Breen & Rottman 1995 : 98-99) (p. 62)
• & The Conventional Approach to social classification was rarely challenged until the 1980s (Marshall, Swift, & Roberts 1997: 43). The authors stress that, in contemporary Britain, women make up half the workforce (unlike in the times of the earlier studies), they take fewer career breaks, are subject to current maternity leave regulations, there are more women living singly or cohabiting, more widows than widowers and women are now more likely to define their ‘life chances’ by their own education, skills and occupations rather than who they first marry, or with whom they are currently cohabiting. In summary, an updated view of the social classification of women is necessary in lieu of the changing context. (p. 62)
• & Sociologists have generally preferred to measure social stratification in terms of occupation-based measures rather than ‘income’, as income is seen as an unstable dimension of social position (Raftery 2001;Rose & Pevalin 2003; Rafferty 2007;Rose & Pevalin 2003) (p. 64)
• & It is derived from allocating an occupation to a class position according to its usual characteristics on 3 criteria: market situation (wage, pension, sick pay, benefits); employment status; and work situation (level of autonomy/control) (Aldridge 2001) (p. 65)
• & disadvantages to this approach include that a complex nominal (rather than ordinal) measure is generated which may not be as easily used to study hierarchical structures of advantage/disadvantage (Hout, Brooks, & Manza 1996); the scheme is premised on analysis of male occupational structures (Marshall, Swift, & Roberts 1997); and, lastly, extremes of social classes, such as the upper class or non-working underclass are not distinguished (Aldridge 2001;Penn 1985). (p. 65)
• & being based upon the Goldthorpe scheme, ‘the NS-SEC follows a well-defined sociological position that employment relations and conditions are central to delineating the structure of socio-economic positions in modern societies’ (Rose, Pevalin, & O'Reilly 2001: 1) (p. 66)
• & The Registrar General’s Social Class is built on the assumption that society is a graded hierarchy of occupations ranked according to skill (Rose & Pevalin 2001). The Government’s official class scheme from 1911-1998, the RGSC is arguably the most well known social class scheme in Britain (Roberts 2001). Nonetheless, the six category scheme ranging from unskilled manual to higher level professionals provoked criticism through the difficulty of measuring ‘skill’ and the lack of an underlying theoretical base (Roberts 2001). Positively, the RGSC is widely known and therefore provides a recognisable and comparatively reliable short hand for understanding patterns of socio-economic difference related to occupations. (p. 67)
• & In contrast to the categorical classifications, the Cambridge scales are gradational. Gradational occupation-based schemes identify occupations in terms of how much they typically have of whatever is considered crucialpower, income, status, etc. This approach uses empirical evidence on the structure of social interaction, as measured though friendship and marriage patterns, to characterise occupations in terms of their gradational positions in a structure of social advantage and disadvantage (Prandy 1990;Stewart, Prandy, & Blackburn 1980). (p. 67)
• & These scales are also gender-sensitive with different scales for men and women, which may provide a more contemporary approach; this is particularly appropriate in this research looking at young men and women in their early careers (p. 68)
• & More general disadvantages associated with using occupational data can also be problematic; social class characteristics may not remain constant over time (p. 68)
• & The National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the British Cohort Study (BCS70), are birth cohorts of children born in 1946, 1958 and 1970 respectively, and respondents continue to be surveyed well into adult life. These data sources have historically provided a rich source for youth research. They are now rather dated however, and are of diminishing utility for youth research. (p. 74)
• & Based at Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) has been running since 1991. 18 sweeps (known as Waves) have been carried out. The survey originated as a representative study of 5,500 British households and approximately 10,300 individuals. Based on 45 minute interviews, the ‘panel’ feature of the survey refers to the households (and individuals) being reinterviewed year after year, typically in the autumn. Datasets are updated and re-released annually on the UK Data Archive and, at present, are available to 2008, Wave R. (p. 75)
• & central aim of the BHPS is to enable longitudinal research. (p. 75)
• & However, the BHPS makes a huge effort to follow participants in a number of ways (see Taylor, Brice, Buck, & Prentice-Lane 2009). Strikingly, around 5100 individuals gave full interviews in both Wave A and Wave (p. 76)
• & Taris (2000) relates that attrition is most detrimental when it is a cumulative problem. Once an individual has dropped out after a certain number of waves, they are then lost permanently. In the case of the BHPS, however, as the sampling revolves around households, it is quite common for family members to return after an extended absence, such as a young person returning from university. These individuals will have incomplete records but will be interviewed again wherever possible, providing some pattern to be further drawn and also insight into the mobility of household members (Blundell, Brewer, & Francesconi 2004). (p. 77)
• & Figure 3.1 (p. 78)
• & Arranged using several record types, the BHPS is designed to be matched using the aforementioned personal identification number (PID). The diagram below illustrates the composition of the survey records’ contents structured above. (p. 81)
• & Figure 3.2 (p. 82)
• & In addition to the copious amount of existing data, the BHPS also supports the innovation of adjoining new questions at pertinent time points which reflect changing policy and research issues. (p. 84)
• & ‘the BHPS..... includes information on current labour market status......and the date at which that status was entered. For those in some form (p. 85)
• & of employment, data on a range of job characteristics are available... also includes an account of all labour market transitions occurring since September of the previous year....information on type of employment (or status if out of the labour force), spell start and end dates, occupation, industry and the reason for leaving any jobs. These rich sources of employment data, together with the household and demographic information collected at each date of interview, make the BHPS particularly important for labour market research.’ (Berthoud & Gershuny 2000: 75) (p. 86)
• & On the down side, there are limitations which can apply across the board to many large scale studies. Firstly, whilst there are hundreds of measures the exact variables desired for specific analyses might not be there. (p. 86)
• & the data structure is relatively complex and requires expertise with data handling (p. 86)
• & The present focus is on Rising 16’s in the BHPS. These are young people in BHPS households who have ‘aged’ into the scope of the adult survey (illustrated below). (p. 87)
• important to include:
  • & Figure 3.3 (p. 87)
• & As discussed earlier, Rising 16’s refer specifically to those young adults, answering their first (and subsequent) full adult interview, who have also been enumerated (or given a youth interview) as members of BHPS households prior to their entry into the BHPS main adult sample (p. 88)
• & Table 3.2 shows the ‘synthetic cohorts’ constructed for use in some later analyses. These are the Rising 16’s split into school year in order to do some educational outcome comparisons with the YCS, shown in later chapters. The table displays the number of Rising 16’s who started in each year and the following percentage that remained present in the survey each wave thereafter. This highlights that even after 17 waves, over 50% of the 1991 school leavers are still in the survey. (p. 89)
• & Synthetic Cohorts of BHPS Rising 16’s (waves A-P): Original sample sizes and subsequent percentages (p. 90)
• & From the outset it is clear that the ‘synthetic cohorts’ have relatively small sample sizes. Between Wave A (1991) and Wave P (2006) 1,870 young people living in England and Wales grew up into the scope of the adult survey from Original (Essex) sample households. This represents about 120 young people each school year. However, analysis here comparing this subsample with that of the nationally representative YCS, proved that the Rising 16’s do closely imitate the trends of the national population (p. 91)
• & The cohorts were constructed by splitting the BHPS Waves (years of interview) into school years depending on whether a young person is born before or after the September watershed (the cut-off point for the forming of school classes by birth date in England and Wales). (p. 91)
• & These synthetic cohorts can then be used for the motivation of exploring whether or not data from the BHPS can be used to sensibly study aspects of growing up in Britain in the 1990s. (p. 92)
• & there is the possibility of imputing those who had retrospective ‘parental data’ (i.e. data on parents, given by children) in order to, potentially, reduce the missing data. (p. 92)
• & We construct synthetic school year cohorts from the Rising 16’s data. This is because waves of the BHPS generally contain two groups of Rising 16’s: an older group of 16 year olds who have reached the minimum school leaving age, have completed Year 11 and have usually already sat GCSE exams; and a younger group of 16 year olds who also enter the BHPS adult survey but who have not reached minimum school leaving age at the time of interview, and have not usually sat GCSE exams (p. 100)
• This is important going forward - I think I might need to abandon Scotland for this thesis:
  • & We have also limited the data to young people from households in England and Wales from the original Essex sample. This is primarily because the education system in Scotland differs and pupils undertake different qualifications. Additionally, the Scottish school year and age cut-off points for pupils are different to England and Wales (p. 101)
• & he sample sizes of the ‘synthetic’ cohorts of Rising 16’s are reported in Appendix 2 (p. 101)
• & Table 3.6 BHPS Synthetic Cohorts: Young Person’s Main Activity (%) (p. 104)
• & n summary, these analyses suggest that YCS and BHPS data show consistent national patterns for analysing youth transitions (Gayle, Lambert, & Murray 2009). An obvious benefit of the BHPS structure is that it tracks young people into their late teens and early twenties. This has much appeal because an emerging theme within the sociology of youth is that the transition to adulthood is being extended (see Hollands 1990). Numerous youth researchers have described how young people, differentiated by structural features (especially education and social background), follow different paths during the teenage years after they leave school (MacDonald 1999). (p. 105)
• & In this chapter we see that the BHPS provides detailed micro-level data over a range of birth years which may be suitable for teasing out and empirically evaluating possible trends. (p. 106)
• & The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) was introduced in the late 1980s (Department of Education 1985;Mobley, Emerson, Goddard, Goodwin, & Letch 1986;North 1987). (p. 107)
• & Poor GCSE attainment is a considerable obstacle which may preclude young people from pursuing more desirable educational courses (Gayle, Lambert, & Murray 2009) (p. 108)
• & GCSEs differed from the established Ordinary Level General Certificate of Education (GCE O-Level) and Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) examinations which they replaced. A new grading scheme was established and there were also changes in the nature and format of examinations and widespread assessment by coursework was introduced (Ashford, Gray, & Tranmer 1993). GCSEs are now the standard qualification for pupils in England and Wales and are taken in the final year of compulsory schooling (Year 11) when the pupils are generally aged 16 (p. 108)
• & GCSEs are graded in discrete ordered categories, the highest being A*, followed by grades A through to G. (p. 108)
• & Initially a single outcome was concentrated on. This is whether or not the young person attains five or more GCSEs at the level of grade A*-C. This measure is an official benchmark (Leckie & Goldstein 2009). It is also frequently used in educational research ( e.g. Connolly 2006). (p. 109)
• & Figure 4.1 (p. 110)
• & Descriptive Characteristics: Young People Attaining 5+GCSEs (A*-C) (p. 112)
• & ring the 1970s and 1980s the primary focus of research on gender in the field of education was on girls (Warrington & Younger 2000). (p. 113)
• & It is well observed that there are differing levels of attainment across ethnic groups (see Bhattacharyyal, Ison, & Blair 2003;Drew 1995;Drew, Gray, & Sime 1992;Gillborn & Gipps 1996). (p. 113)
• & The small numbers of ethnic minority Rising 16’s are reported in Appendix 2 and the correspondingly small numbers attaining 5+ GCSEs at grades A*-C are reported in Table 4.1. Therefore in the remainder of this analysis we do not include any ethnicity measures (p. 114)
• & Table 4.2 reports the results of a logistic regression model estimating attaining 5+ GCSEs grades A*-C for the YCS data and the BHPS Rising 16’s. We have constructed a measure of school year grouping (cohort) in the BHPS Rising 16’s dataset to compare these young people more readily with counterparts in the YCS cohorts. Overall the results of these two models are similar and it is encouraging that these two models lead to broadly comparable substantive conclusions. (p. 116)
• Essential to replicate something similar in own thesis:
  • & it is of value to consider the circumstances and trajectories of all young people, regardless of the type of activities undertake (p. 121)
• & ‘As growing research reveals the diverging contours and the different experiences encountered by the individuals making the transition in various countries, the ‘fuzzy’ nature of the transition concept becomes more evident. No single definition of that concept is sufficiently well-defined to enable us to identify, in a straightforward fashion, key events delimiting the timing of the process and the individuals involved’ (Couppie & Mansuy 2003: 63). (p. 149)
• & at times, involves a reversal of direction (Stokes & Wyn 2007) (p. 150)
• & For many, the model of a clear transition from school to work is no longer a fair description of UK or other western labour markets (Blossfeld, Mills, & Bernardi 2006). However, Roberts (2006) retains the term ‘transition’, arguing that although there is not a strictly ordered route taken by most young people, at some point most young people do still ‘reach destination’ (2006: 263). (p. 150)
• & Major initiatives embraced a ‘welfare to work’ ideology (e.g. Pearce & Paxton 2005) such as new training initiatives (New Deal for Young People) and the introduction of the minimum wage, detailed below. (p. 151)
• & The plethora of changes came into force at a time which can be seen to impact on the Rising 16’s cohort under study (births between 1975 and 1991) (p. 151)
• & The 1975-1991 birth cohorts reached compulsory school leaving age between the years of 1991 and 2007, and these groups are ideally placed to enable the effect of change in payment and benefits legislation for young people to be explored. (p. 152)
• & Minimum-age school leavers continued to be excluded from the unemployment benefits available to older workers over the period (Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) 1998;Mizen 2004) (p. 152)
• & All measures of occupation reported from year to year by the respondents are linked with a selection of social stratification measures based on occupations: the Goldthorpe scheme, Registrar’s General scheme, NS-SEC, Cambridge Scale and, after matching with online resources (www.camsis.stir.ac.uk), the CAMSIS social interaction and stratification scale (p. 154)
• & The above descriptive statistics (table 5.1) concur with the nationally representative figures which show slightly more young women staying on in education past 16, and a small number more men in the labour market at 17 than women (Gayle, Lambert, & Murray 2009: 38) (p. 157)
• Important part of the risk discussion:
  • & This illustrates part of the argument put forward here that, despite claims of ‘individualisation’ and a weakening of traditional markers, there is no evidence that social structures have become fragmented (Furlong & Cartmel 2007: 35), in other words, that the effects of social origins have diminished. This echoes the conjecture of Beck who writes on the ‘Ambivalent Social Structure’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002), and of ‘Individualization as a Sharpening of Social Inequality’ (46). However, these patterns need not reflect ‘detraditionalisation’, but could represent Furlong and Cartmel’s ( 2007:35) suggestion, that ‘the seemingly individualized ‘churn’ within the precarious sector of the labour market can perhaps be regarded as part of a new set of class-based experiences’. (p. 161)
• & Figure 5.4 (p. 170)
• Important for the discussion of missing data:
  • & When looking at the Cambridge Scale score of the individuals at different ages, there is a problem which occurs because many responses are missing and we anticipate that the reasons for this (i.e. not being in work) are themselves related processes to the summary model. To paraphrase Breen’s question in his monograph on selection data: How do we use the sample data to estimate the relationship that holds between Cambridge Scale score and the explanatory variables in the population when we know that observability (p. 177)
• & of the Cambridge Scale measure is itself a function of explanatory variables (Breen 1996)? (p. 178)
• Perhaps I need to focus on an expansion of the gender element in my thesis:
  • & evidence from studies such as Lampard ( 1995) and Kalmijn( 1994), who found that using mother’s position separately, can add something to analysis that was previously missed. ‘The effects of father’s occupation and mother’s occupation can be seen to be independent of each other and cumulative’ (Lampard 1995: 724). And furthermore: ‘This effect exists for both sexes, though it is especially important in the case of female children’ (Lampard 1995: 725). (p. 185)
• & Sociologists have often regarded the family as the principal unit of social stratification (Heath & Payne 2000). (p. 209)
• & Lenski (1966) advocated the ‘individual’, rather than just ‘the family’, as the only unit of stratification, suggesting that the family model is good enough in agrarian societies but not suitable for industrial ones, particularly because the situation of women has changed with industrialization: ‘it is no longer feasible to view them as merely dependents of some male...[I]n short, the traditional barriers which long separated the female system of stratification from the male, and kept the former dependent on the latter, are clearly crumbling’ (Lenski 1966: 403). (p. 210)
• & Moreover, the nature of the relation between individuals and their families is likely to vary across contexts. Uhlenberg and Mueller (2003) write that: ‘one should not discuss consequences of family context for a particular life course outcome as if those relationships were universal. The significance of any specific family environment may vary markedly across societies and across time (and even across individuals within the same family)’ (2003: 124) (p. 211)
• & Sorensen ( 2005) asks whether the family’s ability to transmit advantage to their children has been weakened, rendering the mobility regime more fluid. (p. 211)
• & ‘The family is multiple and combinative’ (Beck & BeckGernsheim 2002), that is to say, made complex as the result of divorce, remarriage, or the co-residence of step parent/ step children and half siblings. (p. 216)
• & (Drew 1995) writes of the effects of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors (92) on the decision to stay on in education at these pivotal points. Below (tables 6.34-6.36) are examples of the effects of attitudes and expectations on the attainment of young people at age 16 and 18. These are cited as ‘push’ factors alongside family pressures and experiences. The ‘pull’ factors comprise effects such as the attractions of work and income. These ‘pull’ factors relate to the labour market and youth unemployment, essentially linked to the arguments of Beck (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002) and the continued influence of structural factors at a time when the there is argued ‘detraditionalisation’ and perceived individualisation (Beck & BeckGernsheim 2002). (p. 262)
• & As described by Ryder (1965), each cohort’s experience is unique; (p. 270)
• Sequence analysis may be attractive to compare social class over the life course:
  • & Sequence analysis is a method which was first used in Biology in order to examine DNA sequences. Increasingly, however, its efficacy for analysis in the social sciences has been utilised. Applications of sequence analysis to research into careers, residential mobility and also school to work transitions (Abbott & Tsay 2000;McVicar & Anyadike-Danes 2002) is said to enable an examination of the fuller longitudinal ‘process’ which is otherwise frequently eschewed in favour of origin to destination, social mobility style outcomes. (p. 271)