Department of Sociology, Yale University, USA.
Department of Statistics, Columbia University, USA.
Soc Sci Res. 2023 Feb;110:102818. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102818. Epub 2022 Nov 24.
We discuss hypotheses researchers have put forth to explain how outcomes of socially mobile and immobile individuals might differ and/or how mobility experiences are related to outcomes of interest. Next, we examine the methodological literature on this topic, culminating in the development of the diagonal mobility model (DMM, also called the diagonal reference model in some studies), the primary tool of use since the 1980's. We then discuss some of the many applications of the DMM. Although the model was proposed to examine the effects of social mobility on outcomes of interest, the estimated relationships between mobility and outcomes that researchers have called mobility effects are more appropriately regarded as partial associations. When mobility is not associated with outcomes, as is often found in empirical work, the outcomes of movers from origin o to destination d are a weighted average of the outcomes of individuals who remained in states o and d respectively, and the weights capture the relative salience of origins and destinations in the acculturation process. In light of this attractive feature of the model, we briefly develop several generalizations of the current DMM that future researchers should also find useful. Finally, we propose new estimands of mobility effects, based on the explicit notion that a unit effect of mobility is a comparison of an individual with herself under two conditions, one in which she is mobile, the other in which she is immobile, and we discuss some of the challenges in identifying such effects.
我们讨论了研究人员提出的假设，以解释社会流动和不流动个体的结果如何可能有所不同，以及流动性经验如何与感兴趣的结果相关。接下来，我们考察了关于这个主题的方法论文献，最终提出了对角线流动性模型（DMM，在一些研究中也称为对角线参考模型），这是自 20 世纪 80 年代以来主要使用的工具。然后，我们讨论了 DMM 的一些应用。尽管该模型是为了检验社会流动性对感兴趣结果的影响而提出的，但研究人员所称的流动性与结果之间的估计关系更应被视为部分关联。当流动性与结果不相关时，就像在实证工作中经常发现的那样，从起源 o 到目的地 d 的流动者的结果是分别留在状态 o 和 d 的个体的结果的加权平均值，权重捕获了在文化适应过程中起源和目的地的相对重要性。鉴于该模型的这一吸引人的特点，我们简要地发展了当前 DMM 的几个推广，未来的研究人员也应该会发现这些推广很有用。最后，我们提出了基于明确的流动性效应的新估计量的概念，即流动性的单位效应是将一个个体在两种条件下与自己进行比较的结果，一种是她是流动的，另一种是她是不流动的，我们还讨论了识别这种效应的一些挑战。
