Strong interest in research on social inequality from Dep. of Sociology

Two articles on social inequality from the Department of Sociology are currently among the best ranked at the highly regarded journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. One article is the most downloaded and the other takes second place as most cited

Social inequality has long been a very strong research discipline at the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Currently two articles on the subject are among the most popular at the internationally regarded journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.

Most downloaded article
The article “The effect of grandparents’ economic, cultural, and social capital on grandchildren's educational success” by PhD Fellow Stine Møllegaard and Professor Mads Meier Jæger is currently the journal´s most downloaded article.
In the article Møllegaard and Jæger analyze data from Denmark and hypothesize that grandparents’ economic capital should be of little importance in the Scandinavian context, while their cultural and social capital should be relatively more important. Their results partly confirm these hypotheses since, after controlling for parents’ capital, they find that grandparents’ cultural capital (but not their economic and social capital) has a positive effect on the likelihood that grandchildren choose the academic track in upper secondary education over all other tracks. These results suggest, at least in the Scandinavian context, that the ways in which grandparents affect grandchildren's educational success is via transmission of non-economic resources.

Second most cited article
The article “Decomposing primary and secondary effects: A new decomposition method” by Post doc Kristian B. Karlson and Professor Anders Holm is currently the journal´s second most cited article with a total of 41 citations (10 December 2015).
The article looks at how one strand of educational inequality research aims at decomposing the effect of social class origin on educational choices into primary and secondary effects. In the article Karlson and Holm formalize this distinction and present a new and simple method that allows empirical assessment of the relative magnitudes of primary and secondary effects. Contrary to other decomposition methods, this new method is unbiased, is more intuitive, and decomposes effects of both discrete and continuous measures of social origin. The method also provides analytically derived statistical tests and is easily calculated with standard statistical software. The article gives examples using the Danish Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Read more about Research in Social Stratification and Mobility

Stine Møllegaard and Mads Meier Jæger: “The effect of grandparents’ economic, cultural, and social capital on grandchildren's educational success”

Kristian B. Karlson and Anders Holm: “Decomposing primary and secondary effects: A new decomposition method”