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Filial Intelligence and Family Social Class, 1947 to 2012

By on October 20, 2021 in Articles

Lindsay Paterson

Sociological Science October 20, 2021
10.15195/v8.a16

Abstract

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Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how inequality operates and is reproduced. The present analysis uses social surveys of children aged 10 to 11 years in Britain between 1947 and 2012 to assess whether the social-class distribution of intelligence has changed. The main conclusions are that, although children’s intelligence relative to their peers remains associated with social class, the association may have weakened recently, mainly because the average intelligence in the highest-status classes may have moved closer to the mean.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Lindsay Paterson: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
E-mail: lindsay.paterson@ed.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: The research was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (grant number MRF-2017-002). I am grateful to Professor Ian J. Deary, director of the Lothian Birth Cohorts, University of Edinburgh, for data from the 1947 survey; to the Medical Research Council (MRC) Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing, University College London, and the principal investigators of the MRC National Survey of Health and Development (doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101), for data from the 1957 survey; and to the UK Data Archive for data from the 1969, 1980, and 2012 surveys. I thank the study participants in all these surveys for their data, and also members of the scientific and data collection teams who have been involved in the data collection. I am grateful to Ian J. Deary and Roxanne Connelly for comments on a draft of the article.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Paterson, Lindsay. 2021. “Filial Intelligence and Family Social Class, 1947 to 2012.” Sociological Science 8: 325-345.
  • Received: August 13, 2021
  • Accepted: August 25, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Richard Breen
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a16


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