Blau & Duncan’s Status Attainment Path Model
General Considerations
The hypothesized causal sequence in Blau &
Duncan’s status attainment model generally holds that dad’s education à dad’s job status (& that these, in turn) à kid’s education à both kid’s 1st job status and à kid’s job status further down the career path. (Note: this model would now need to incorporate mom too: the article’s
almost 40 yrs. old.)
So, level of education is the first “attainment,” both
for the dad and the kid.
However, how far the kid goes in education is hypothetically
determined by how far the father had gone before him. (“Hypothetically,” because that’s what Blau & Duncan are testing,
to either verify of falsify the proposition.)
General Findings
There is a direct, positive relationship between both dad’s education and
kid’s education and between dad’s occupational status and kid’s
education.
The relationship between these variables is not
strong, however: coefficients of .310
and .279, respectively.
Kid’s education is an intervening variable in the ultimate job status: it is affected by dad’s
education, and it, in turn, affects both first job and occupation in 1962.
As they point out later in the article (p. 43), ca.
58% of the variation in kid’s ultimate job status is unexplained
variation (i.e. variables not
accounted for by this model)
Or