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ISS Grant Breaks Down Disciplinary Borders
in Study of Inequality |
With the support of an ISS seed grant, Professor Kim Weeden’s project on multidimensional inequalities has generated two publications, preliminary data work, and a draft of a NIH grant proposal. Kim is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology and on the Executive Committee of the Center for the Study of Inequality. Her co-author on the project, David Grusky, is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and Director of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality.
Overview of project:
Social scientists have documented dramatic changes in inequality in the distribution of various valued goods (e.g., income, wealth, education). For the most part, their work focuses on one or two valued goods at a time, and hence cannot speak to inequality more comprehensively. This project develops a new framework for characterizing a multidimensional inequality space defined by inputs (e.g., experience, education), working conditions (e.g., employment status, type of employment contract), and outputs (e.g., income, wealth).
The new framework has two purposes. First, it can be used to test long-standing assumptions about inequality measurement. For example, economists default to income and sociologists to social class or socioeconomic status, typically out of habit or commitment to a particular disciplinary tradition. The framework converts these disciplinary assumptions about inequality into testable hypotheses, and, if need be, offers an empirically justifiable and truly interdisciplinary alternative for measuring inequality.
The framework can also be used to help scholars and policy makers understand how inequality is changing. Is inequality increasing when it is measured in terms of the full inequality space rather than just one dimension (e.g., income)? Are the inequality dimensions increasingly crystallized, so that advantage on one implies advantage on all others? Is wealth becoming the new master dimension of inequality? Is education? If so, are true wealth or education “classes” emerging? Is the underclass becoming more coherent, or is it internally fractured?
Activities to date:
Two theoretical articles, both co-authored with David Grusky, develop parts of the larger argument. The first shows how the framework can be used to test the sociological notion of social class, which locates people in the inequality space according to their position in the division of labor. (Social Class: How Does it Work, A. Lareau & D. Conley (Eds.), forthcoming 2007).
The second is directed at a very different audience, namely development economists. Thanks to Amartya Sen and others, development economics is embracing multidimensional conceptions of poverty, but so far its methodological tools haven’t caught up. This paper, presented at the UN conference in Brazil, offers our framework as one such tool. It will appear in the volume, The Many Dimensions of Poverty (N. Kakwani & J. Silber, Eds).
Continuing work. The new framework will be applied to US data collected in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), at least initially. ISS funds helped support a sociology graduate student, Youngjoo Cha, as she learned the unusually complex data structure of the SIPP, extracted variables, merged cases across waves and panels, reshaped data files, and constructed initial tables. (Additional support for Youngjoo was provided by the Center for the Study of Inequality). The ISS proposal, the two theoretical publications, as well as the preliminary data work culminated in a draft of a NIH grant proposal that will be submitted in June 2007.
