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

现代英国是一个开放和公平的社会吗？与他们的前辈相比，1990年代末出生的儿童的生活机会是改善了还是恶化了？产业构成、学校质量、社会资本等地方特征与居民的生活机会有什么关系？我们在这个研究项目中所关心的正是诸如此类的问题。我们将使用最近完成的2021年人口普查的数据，与1971年以前的人口普查相关联，以进一步了解“社会流动性”-研究人们的工作和生活水平如何受到他们成长的社会和经济背景的影响。这些都是及时的问题。英国的生活水平一直在下降，生产力停滞不前，真实的工资下降，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相关的问题。然而，尽管政治家和评论家经常提到这个话题，但实际上对最近一批人的社会流动经验知之甚少。这主要是因为分析代际社会流动性所需的高质量数据到目前为止根本无法获得。填补国家证据库中的这一空白将是这项研究的关键贡献。我们的研究结果将提供关于英格兰和威尔士代际社会流动性的重要新证据，使用独特的新数据源-国家统计局纵向研究（ONS-LS），该研究将1971年至2021年间的人口普查中的个人联系起来。ONS-LS对于研究社会流动性有几个关键好处，特别是其非常大的样本量，每十年都有超过50万人加入。它的规模和寿命将使我们能够跟踪研究成员从童年到成年的连续几代人的生活，将他们在生命中不同时刻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ONS-LS计算1990年代出生的儿童的社会流动率，并将其与1950年代末至1980年代末的早期群体进行比较。除了在国家一级跟踪个人，我们还将研究社会流动机会如何在地区和地方当局之间变化，以及流动机会的地理差异如何与人们居住的地区的特征相关。我们将努力工作，确保我们的研究结果被用于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.