An "i-Mobility" framework for studying social mobility: individualized inference via generative analysis of discrete data

Music City Center 

Social mobility refers to the ability of individuals or groups to move within a social hierarchy. Interest in social mobility has grown over the past decades due to rising concerns over educational disparities and intergenerational persistence of poverty. The existing literature primarily investigates this issue by focusing on rough demographic groups (e.g., race, gender, or country), which may overlook importance characteristic nuances between individuals. In this work, we establish an "i-Mobility" framework that allows us to study social mobility at the individual level. Specifically, given a predefined profile with a combination of individual characteristics, our framework can provide a measure that reflects the mobility of this "individual". The analysis of the well-regarded General Social Survey (GSS) shows that our framework is more robust than the traditional group-focused methods for social mobility. Moreover, our framework can capture heterogeneity at the individual level and distinguish between different profiles by considering more nuanced personal characteristics.