Exploring Concepts of Social Mobility

This chapter has two purposes. The first is to define clearly different social mobility concepts and components. The second is to embed these concepts and components into a larger context of social mobility research. The core of the chapter develops six mobility concepts and their measures as well as six macromobility components and their measures. The next section relates these concepts and components to issues in the mobility literature. The chapter concludes with a checklist of suggestions for conducting and presenting social mobility research: being explicit about several preliminaries—outcome of interest, context, and level of analysis—and then four steps—question, mobility concept(s), mobility measure(s), and empirical findings.