Children of the 1990s - extending understanding of social mobility in England and Wales

现代英国是一个开放、公平的社会吗？90年代末出生的孩子与他们的前辈相比，他们的生活机会是改善了还是恶化了？当地的产业结构、学校质量、社会资本等特征与居民的生活机会有何关系？这就是我们在本研究项目中所关注的问题。我们将使用最近完成的2021年人口普查的数据，将这些数据与1971年之前的人口普查联系起来，以加深我们对社会流动性的理解--研究人们的工作和生活水平是如何受到他们成长的社会和经济背景的影响的。这些都是适时的问题。英国的生活水平一直在下降，生产率停滞不前，实际工资下降，生活成本大幅上升。因此，与他们的父母相比，最近几代人的情况如何是一个非常中肯的问题。然而，尽管政客和评论员经常提到这个话题，但人们实际上对最近一批人的社会流动经历知之甚少。这主要是因为分析代际社会流动性所需的高质量数据直到现在才能获得。填补国家证据基础中的这一空白将是这项研究的关键贡献。我们的发现将为英格兰和威尔士代际社会流动性提供重要的新证据，使用一个独特的新数据来源-国家统计办公室纵向研究(ONS-LS)，它将1971年至2021年的人口普查中的个人联系起来。ONS-LS在研究社会流动性方面有几个关键好处，特别是其非常大的样本量，每连续十年都有超过50万人被纳入其中。它的大小和寿命将使我们能够跟踪研究成员从童年到成年的几代人的生活，将他们在生命中不同阶段结束的职业与他们父母几十年前的职业进行比较。我们将首次使用国家统计局-LS来计算90年代出生的儿童的社会流动性比率，并将他们与更早的队列进行比较，范围从20世纪50年代末到80年代末。除了在国家层面上跟踪个人随着时间的推移，我们还将研究社会流动机会在不同地区和地方当局之间的差异，以及流动机会的地理差异如何与人们所在地区的特征相关。我们将努力确保我们的发现被用来为地方和国家政策提供信息，以改善生活机会和减少不平等。

Is modern Britain an open and fair society? Have the life-chances of children born in the late 1990s improved or deteriorated compared to their predecessors? How do characteristics of local areas such as industrial composition, school quality, and social capital relate to the life-chances of residents? It is questions such as these that we are concerned with in this research project. We will use data from the recently completed 2021 census, linked to previous censuses back to 1971, in order to further our understanding of 'social mobility' - the study of how people's jobs and standards of living are shaped by the social and economic context of their upbringing. These are timely questions. Living standards in the United Kingdom have been declining, with stagnating productivity, declining real wages, and big increases in the cost of living. The question of how more recent generations are faring compared to their parents is therefore a very pertinent one. However, despite the frequency with which the topic is referred to by politicians and commentators, very little is actually known about the social mobility experiences of recent cohorts. This is primarily because the high-quality data that is required for the analysis of intergenerational social mobility has simply not been available until now. Filling this gap in the national evidence-base will be the key contribution of this research. Our findings will provide important new evidence on intergenerational social mobility in England and Wales using a unique and newly available data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS) which links individuals across censuses between 1971 and 2021.The ONS-LS has several key benefits for studying social mobility, in particular its very large sample size, with over half a million people included at each successive decade. Its size and longevity will enable us to follow the lives of study members across successive generations from childhood to adulthood, comparing the occupations they end up in at different points in their lives to those of their parents' decades earlier. We will use the ONS-LS to calculate social mobility rates, for the first time, for children born in the 1990s and compare them to earlier cohorts, ranging from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. In addition to tracking individuals over time at the national level, we will also examine how social mobility chances have varied across regions and local authorities and how geographic differences in mobility chances are related to the characteristics of the areas people live in. We will work hard to ensure that our findings are used to inform local and national policies to improve life-chances and reduce inequalities.