This workshop will be one of a pair of workshops jointly organised by the EDUC/FAMNET/INCDIS thematic groups which, while constituting independent funding applications, will involve overlapping participation and pooling of information on outcomes. A first workshop, organised by Walter Müller and Chris Whelan, will focus on the potential of the EU-SILC 2005 module on the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty. This second workshop will focus on resources beyond those that have been traditionally emphasised in the mobility literature, such as education.
Some of the major national studies and a number of the large scale comparative surveys (the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Gender and Generation Surveys (GGS), for instance) now provide relevant information related to the intergenerational transmission of various kinds of resources. These sources offer new opportunities for researchers aiming to investigate the processes underlying the reproduction and structuring of social inequality, as well as the role of different forms of capital in such processes.
While research on social mobility as an outcome of the intergenerational transmission of inequality is highly developed and systematised, research on the mechanisms of transmission of inequality on what happens within the “black box” has been more exploratory, likely due to a lack of systematic data suitable for such an analysis. An important exception concerns the role of education, which is traditionally a core element in mobility studies.
The aim of the workshop is to a) discuss the various dimensions and mechanisms that may play a role in the process of transmission of inequality, and b) evaluate the availability and quality of data sources, as well as the analytic possibilities for research oriented to the investigation of what happens within the “black box” of inequality transmission.
