Revisiting the FJH hypothesis

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Ildefonso Marqués-Perales is a professor at the University of Seville. He obtained his doctorate from the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca with a thesis on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He has spent research periods in Leeds (UK), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Tilburg (Netherlands). His main area of research is social mobility and social classes, a subject on which he has published in top international journals such as the British Journal of Sociology, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Indicators Research, International Sociology, and many others.

Presentation of the project

"This presentation attempts to update one of the most entrenched controversies in the field of social mobility: the idea, as maintained by Featherman, Jones & Hauser (1974) in their well-known FJH hypothesis, that societies exhibit a fundamental similarity in social mobility rates. To do that, we exploit the main historical international database that allows a large degree of internationals comparison due to procedures of standardization. To achieve this, we utilize the main international historical database (ISSP, EVS, EVS), enabling extensive cross-national comparisons through standardization procedures. We use an alternative non-parametric approach based on the average of the global odds ratios (without requiring any statistical assumptions (as difference uniform). Our results confirms that there is no clear presence of distinct regimes of social mobility; rather, only a continuum with two breaking points above or below the threshold that includes the majority of countries. Those outside this threshold are few and consistently ."

Speaker

Ildefonso Marqués-Perales is a professor of sociology at the University of Seville.