The concept of intergenerational social mobility refers to change in social position

Intergenerational social mobility refers to the extent to which a person's living standards and/or social position has improved or deteriorated relative to that of their parents. Social mobility between generations is considered a core societal goal in part because of the well-being gains thought to be experienced by the upwardly mobile. This assumption underpins concerns that rates of intergenerational mobility are slowing in some Western countries including the US (Aaronson and Mazumder, 2008) and has even motivated policies to increase mobility in others (UK Government, 2011). Yet, it remains uncertain whether moving up the social hierarchy actually matters for how people evaluate and feel about their lives, which is typically encapsulated under the term subjective well-being (Diener et al., 1999).

There are several reasons to suspect mobility should matter for well-being. Upward social mobility occurs when children grow up to become better educated, have greater access to material resources, and hold more prestigious jobs than their parents. In particular, education confers the knowledge and analytical skills needed to understand physical and psychological health information, the competence and resources required to achieve related goals, and a sense of control that can directly instil welfare benefits (Mirowsky and Ross, 1998, 2005; Mottus et al., 2014). Education has been shown to reduce exposure to blue-collar jobs which can impact health and well-being (Mazzonna, 2014). Higher levels of education also provide valuable skills needed to access high-status jobs that pay well, which has been shown to be associated with increased satisfaction with life (e.g. Diener and Oishi, 2000; Kahneman and Deaton, 2010). Further, evidence from intervention studies and natural experiments suggests that decreases in poverty can lead to reductions in negative affect and stress (Haushofer and Fehr, 2014). Those who experience upward social mobility typically have greater access to material resources than they had as children and for this reason, may perceive fewer financial concerns than others. Insofar as upwards intergenerational social mobility results from greater education, access to material resources, and fewer financial concerns than one's parents, it may also generate improvements in subjective well-being.

A parallel route through which intergenerational mobility may relate to subjective well-being is through health. Many studies reveal that the socioeconomic circumstances in which a person lives affects their health (Adler and Stewart, 2010). Whilst socioeconomic circumstances in childhood have been shown to be specifically important for establishing later health inequalities (Davey Smith et al., 1998), socioeconomic factors in adulthood remain important predictors of disease and health when controlling for early life factors (Marmot et al., 2001) and factors in child- and adulthood have been shown to make independent contributions to later health (Hyde et al., 2006). Improving one's social circumstances relative to that of one's parents may offset some of the negative health consequences of coming from a background of disadvantage. Individuals from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds who improve their social position have fewer chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart/lung disease, hypertension, and cancer compared to those with stable or downward social trajectories (Luo and Waite, 2005). Elsewhere, upward mobility is associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms (Gugushvili et al., 2019b) and self-reported physical health problems at age 32 (Cundiff et al., 2017). We suggest that the positive health benefits of upward mobility are likely to be accompanied by improved subjective well-being.

Despite the various ways in which intergenerational social mobility may be linked to well-being, evidence demonstrating this association remains sparse. Whilst some reports demonstrate that well-being is higher among the upwardly mobile relative to the immobile (Chan, 2018; Zhao et al., 2017) and that upward (but not downward) mobility is associated with positive subjective well-being outcomes (Nikolaev and Burns, 2014), others observe no association between intergenerational mobility and subjective well-being (Hadjar and Samuel, 2015; Marshall and Firth, 1999; Zang and de Graaf, 2016). Prior research has been criticised for the following: (i) relying on bias-prone retrospective assessments of childhood socioeconomic status, (ii) surveying participants of varying ages who have experienced different societal economic circumstances and opportunities for social mobility throughout their lives, and (iii) failing to adjust for potentially confounding third variables (e.g. childhood cognitive ability, personality traits) that could affect both social mobility and well-being throughout adulthood (Iveson and Deary, 2017).

In a recent report, Iveson and Deary (2017) drew on longitudinal data from a Scottish cohort to address each of these issues. First, the authors employed a prospectively assessed measure of intergenerational social mobility (changes in occupational social class) that enabled the degree of social mobility each participant experienced to be operationalised. Second, they sampled a cohort of same-aged individuals, thus ensuring that any observed mobility-wellbeing associations reflected differences in well-being attributable to an individual's change in socioeconomic circumstances relative to their parents, rather than reflecting the impact of broader societal economic change (which was constant across the sample). Thirdly, they controlled for childhood intelligence: a fundamental individual difference characteristic known to predict both social mobility and well-being in adulthood (Von Stumm et al., 2009; Gale et al., 2012). Including controls of this kind is essential to ensuring that associations cannot be explained by individual and psychological characteristics, which are likely to predict both better socioeconomic outcomes as well as higher satisfaction with life.

Iveson and Deary (2017) reported that the amount of change in occupational social class in adulthood relative to childhood (difference between own and father's occupational class) did not predict self-reported life satisfaction or general health in later life. This finding is arguably surprising given the multiple theoretical reasons to expect relationships of this kind as outlined above. We suggest that the absence of a relationship between intergenerational mobility and health and well-being may have arisen for two methodological reasons. First, life satisfaction and health were assessed in retirement (at age 78), when numerous factors may operate to diminish the benefits of intergenerational mobility for well-being. Participants were no longer actively engaged in the labour market at 78 and so the benefits of mobility in occupational class may no longer be tangible to them. If mobility has consequences for health then those who experience upward mobility may live longer and be overrepresented in an older sample, making it more difficult to detect well-being associations with mobility. It is also possible that the prioritization of interpersonal relationships and emotional goals, as well as improvements in the regulation and experience of well-being with age, may mean mobility concerns are less impactful than at earlier points in the life-span (Carstensen and Mikels, 2005). Second, the authors relied on changes in a single indicator of social status (occupational class) thus neglecting a wide-range of alternative (albeit not necessarily equal) social mobility indicators including changes in educational attainment, income, and housing characteristics (see Galobardes et al., 2007, for comparable arguments).

In the current study, we therefore sought to extend Iveson & Deary's work and more comprehensively assess whether intergenerational social mobility predicts well-being in midlife. Specifically, we employed two large-scale prospective UK data cohorts with multiple features advantageous to answering the current question. Both cohorts include comparable prospectively-collected data on multiple aspects of SES (educational attainment, social class, and dwelling size) in both child and adulthood, allowing assessment of the degree of change in social status, but no longer reliant on a single measure. Both cohorts also contain rich data on childhood characteristics - intelligence, self-control, and subjective well-being - that enabled us to identify the potential role of these early life individual differences in explaining relationships between mobility and midlife well-being. Finally, both cohorts included measures of health as well as perceived financial difficulties at age 42, allowing examination of the role of these factors as distinct theoretical mediators of the relationship between mobility and midlife life satisfaction to be examined.

Samples

The British Cohort Study (BCS; Elliott and Shepherd, 2006) and the National Child Development Study (NCDS; Power and Elliott, 2006) are nationally-representative British cohorts that each follow the lives of approximately 17,000 children (BCS: N = 16,569; NCDS: N = 17,416) born in Britain in a single week in 1970 (BCS) and 1958 (NCDS) respectively. Both surveys collect information on the socioeconomic circumstances, physical and educational development, and health and well-being of participants

Results

Across both cohorts, all three measures of SES increased from childhood (T0) to adulthood (T1) indicating the sample as a whole experienced upward intergenerational mobility, as shown in Table 1. Participants completed on average two additional years of education (BCS = 1.98, NCDS = 2.14) than their parents and lived in houses with 0.39 (BCS = 0.39, NCDS = 0.38) more rooms than their childhood homes. The most common occupational social class of participants' fathers was ‘manual skilled worker’

Discussion

The social gradient in well-being has been firmly established (Diener and Oishi, 2000; Kahneman and Deaton, 2010), yet whether shifts in social circumstances between generations are related to subjective well-being has remained uncertain. To test this, we drew on two large-scale birth cohorts, for which changes in social position between generations were modelled as a formative construct capturing prospectively assessed changes in educational attainment, social class, and dwelling size from

Conclusions

Collectively, these data provide evidence that intergenerational mobility is associated with well-being in adulthood. This relationship was comparable across cohorts and remained when adjusting for key psychological traits. Our mediation analyses provided further support for arguments for life-course approaches to health (Marmot et al., 2001) because they reveal that improving one's social circumstances positively predicted adult health, an important corollary of which is higher satisfaction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, the BCS and NCDS cohort members and the survey development teams, as well as the UK Data Service for providing the UK data used here.

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