Measuring Networks beyond the Origin Family

Studies of social mobility typically focus on the associations between the socioeconomic characteristics of individuals and families in one generation and those same characteristics for the next generation. Yet the life chances of individuals may be affected by a wider network of kin than just the nuclear family, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and even more remote kin. In planning new studies of intergenerational social mobility, researchers should consider the ways that more remote kin may affect socioeconomic success and hardship and design data collection strategies for collecting data on wider kin networks. Administrative record linkage and survey research have complementary advantages for identifying kin networks. Successful implementation of these approaches holds the promise of a much richer set of studies of intergenerational social mobility than most researchers have attempted thus far.