Sociology 789b

Reeve Vanneman

Stratification: Social Class, Family, and Community

This is a review of the literature seminar designed to cover some of the major topics in the stratification literature. It is organized topically (see schedule), much like the literature itself. The field is so vast that it has been been segmented into mostly self-contained issues with surprisingly little cross- fertilization between issues.

We will acknowledge this segmentation while still trying to draw some overarching lessons about how to think about stratification issues. Each week we will take up a different topic, looking at a handful of important contributions -- usually journal articles. A few weeks, however, we will concentrate on a single major book that has helped shape the field.

The topics selected are not meant to be comprehensive. They were chosen in part to fill in the holes of the graduate strat curriculum. For instance, none of the topics deal centrally with race and gender since the department offers several excellent courses focusing on those dimensions of stratification (although we cannot, of course, ignore how each of these issues below intersect with race and gender). Also, we do not focus much on income inequality and how that varies over time and across space -- although that is one of the central stratification issues of our time.

Partly as a result, many of the topics we do cover have a more micro than macro focus. They tend to ask how individuals are allocated to positions with the class structure rather than how that structure itself changes over time or across nations or regions. This micro focus reflects the orientation of much of the stratification literature, but, as we will see, this has been one of its weaknesses.

Our answer to this micro-focus of the literature will be to emphasize the contextual factors that often determine how individual stratification processes operate. Individuals are nested within families, communities, and different poles in the global economy, and those contexts alter how the individual relationships play out. For example, William J. Wilson's great contribution to poverty analyses has been that growing up in a poor family has very different consequences if that family lives in a poor neighborhood than in a mixed or middle-class neighborhood. And Dalton Conley has argued that family effects on sibling outcomes are very different in middle-class and working-class families. What we will be especially interested in is not merely how family and community contexts have direct effects on individual outcomes, but how they condition other factors that affect those outcomes.

Another consistent theme that will appear and re-appear throughout these topics is how research grapples with the question of causality. We will read many examples of different ways that research designs have tried to find firmer answers to whether the association between background characteristics and later class position are truly causal. We all learn in introductory research methods that "correlation is not causation." This is a problem in all social research but is especially prominent in stratification research. In our readings we will look at the usefulness of fixed effects designs, of "natural" experiments and actual policy experiments, of instrumental variable approaches, and of more conventional multivariate regressions. As we encounter these designs, we will step back to ask what are their advantages and disadvantages for telling us about how the stratification system works.

Finally, our readings will include both quantitative and qualitative methods, often focusing on the same issue. Whenever possible, we will try to take time to ask about the relative contributions of qualitative and quantitative methods in advancing our knowledge about stratification.

So these three themes:

• contextual effects on stratification outcomes,
• inferences about causality, and
• the relative merits of qualitative and quantitative methods

are ideas you should try to identify and think about whenever the readings provide examples. Note too, that these are the central issues in the essay questions for the final exam.