In this paper we analyse the health effects of fixed-term contract status for men and women in West-Germany and Spain using panel data. This paper asks whether changes in the employment relationship, as a result of the liberalisation of employment law, have altered the positive health effects associated with employment (Goldsmith et al. 1996; Jahoda 1982). Using information on switches between unemployment and employment by contract type we analyze whether transitions to different contracts have different health effects. We find that unemployed workers show positive health effects at job acquisition, and also find the positive effect to be smaller for workers who obtain a fixed-term job. We also establish surprising differences by gender and country, with women less likely to report positive health effects at job acquisition. For West-Germany, this was found to be a function of the dual-burden of paid and unpaid care within the home.

The distinction of primary and secondary effects of social background on educational attain-ment, which has been introduced by Boudon (1974), has received a lot of attention recently. Primary effects are influences of social background on school performance and secondary effects are influences of social background on educational decisions even if performance is held constant. Erikson et al. (2005) have provided a method to empirically evaluate the impact of primary and secondary effects at educational transitions. In this paper I draw on this method and extend it to a sequential consideration of transitions from elementary school to higher education enrolment in Germany. Furthermore, I provide an example of how different data sources can be combined for this purpose when biographical data on educational careers is absent. Following the primary and secondary effects framework I simulate the cumulative impact of interventions at different branching points of the education system and evaluate the counterfactual outcomes against the factual situation. The results reveal that interventions at early branching points are more effective than late interventions. They suggest further that measures that are targeted at reducing primary effects are effective in retaining performance levels but only moderately effective in increasing educational participation rates. Measures that are targeting at a reduction of secondary effects are effective in increasing participation rates but lead to a devaluation of performance levels.

The idea of an education-based meritocracy (EBM) has evident political attractions. It suggests a basis on which the objectives of social efficiency, social mobility and social justice might be reconciled. However, the question is raised of its sociological viability. Three processes of change are identified, concerning the association between individuals’ social origins, their educational attainments and their social destinations, each of which should be observed in any society that is moving towards an EBM. Results of analyses based on several different data-sets are then presented which indicate that in Britain these changes are not in fact in train. Similar results from other modern societies are noted. It is then argued that the barriers to the realisation of an EBM to which these findings point are of more than a transient kind. There are features of modern market-based economies and societies that are not consistent with the principles of an EBM and that could be modified, if at all, only through rather radical policy interventions.

While recent research on class mobility in Britain has found no change in the association between fathers’ and children’s class positions, research on income mobility suggests that the association between parental income and children’s earnings increased between the birth cohorts of 1958 and 1970. In this paper we have started out from these divergent findings from analyses of the same data-sets.
We show, first of all, that the contrasting findings are not the result of the researchers concerned working, on account of missing data, with different subsets of respondents from the two data-sets. Secondly, we have shown that for both cohorts alike there is a stronger association between father’s class and child’s class than between family income and child’s earnings, although this difference is much reduced from the 1958 to the 1970 cohort.
Thirdly, we have examined the relationship between class and income, as present in the data that we have used in our analyses of mobility, and find that this relationship is generally stable except where family income is involved. For the 1958 cohort there is a much weaker linkage than for the 1970 cohort between family income, on the one hand, and father’s class, child’s class and child’s earnings, on the other. And, fourthly, we show corresponding relationships between father’s class, parental income and child’s highest education,
Thus, rather than searching the explanation to the observed increase in the association between family income and children’ earnings in specific conditions for the 1970 cohort, we would rather focus on the weakness of this association in the 1958 cohort. In this regard, we suggest that it may be that the apparent decrease in income mobility is at least in some important part the result of the family income variable for the later cohort providing a better measure of permanent income than that for the earlier cohort.

Using data for seven European countries we analyse trends among women in class differences in educational attainment over the first two-thirds of the 20th century. We also compare educational attainment between men and women; we ask whether class differences among the two sexes are similar or not; and whether trends in class differences over birth cohorts have differed between men and women. We find that, as expected, over the 20th century, inequalities between men and women in their educational attainment declined markedly. More importantly, changes in class inequalities in educational attainment have been similar for both men and women, although, in some countries, women displayed greater inequality at the start of the 20th century and have shown a somewhat greater rate of increase in equality. Patterns of class inequality were also largely similar for both sexes, though in some countries daughters of farmers and the petty-bourgeoisie did relatively better than their brothers. While some of these results reinforce what has long been believed, our central finding of a decline in class inequality in educational attainment for both men and women contradicts the ‘persistent inequality’ in education that earlier scholars claimed existed.

Educational attainment is a core social background variable covered in each and every single social survey. Cross-national surveys are particularly vulnerable to sub-optimal measurement of education. In this paper, the cross-national measurement of educational attainment is evaluated using data of the European Social Survey (ESS). After discussing some theoretical background of the comparable measurement of education generally, the most commonly used comparable measures are introduced. A brief overview over previous evaluations is given. In the main part of the paper, the implementation of a simplified version of the International Standard Classification of Education 1997 (ISCED–97) in the ESS is discussed and evaluated in several ways: By looking at the consistency of the reclassification of national education variables into the comparable variable; at how the comparable variable is distributed, how much explanatory power of educational attainment is lost by harmonising the national variables (using occupational status as the criterion), and which steps of the harmonisation process affect the results most strongly in the single countries. Finally, an alternative way of simplifying ISCED–97 is proposed, which could improve the measure’s comparability and predictive power.