Occupations, Role Characteristics, and Intergenerational Transmission

Abstract

This article examines the intergenerational covariation in detailed aspects of occupational roles. Occupations are conceptualized and measured on the basis of indicators for role requirements, content, and rewards. The detailed components are thought to underlie overall role characterizations such as socioeconomic status transmission. Data pertain to a national sample of male members of the civilian labor force and to a countywide sample of high school males. Canonical correlation analyses for two role relationships, involving parent occupation, early career occupation, and late adolescent occupational aspirations, show: (1) role transmission occurs for a multiplicity of occupational characteristics that span the requirements, content, and rewards of roles; (2) the two role relation ships are not isomorphic in their structure; (3) support for recent arguments that complexity of roles is a key organizing feature of role transmission processes; and (4) mixed support for recent research on patterns of intergenerational occupational movement.