Research Bio
I grew up during China’s economic transition from a communist regime to a market-based system. My experience growing up in a time of great institutional change motivated me to understand how these dramatic social changes influenced patterns of social status attainment, job mobility, and social inequality. My undergraduate thesis showed that while large-scale institutional change provides opportunities for social mobility for many, the already privileged benefited the most from these opportunities. Prior social status attainments are key determinants of later social status attainments, despite dramatic institutional change.
This realization induced me to shift my research interests. Rather than focusing only on the connection between individuals’ early and later life status attainments, I began to ask how privileged families also manage to maintain their social status over time, often long periods of time, despite large-scale changes in the political economy, population structures, and cultural values. I have thus extended my research into social reproduction of families across generations, and micro-macro interactions between families and institutional and population contexts of social stratification. My current research centers on understanding roles of families, lineages, and dynasties in shaping social inequality and population dynamics over decades and centuries.
Transmission of status across generations is a central concern in studies of social stratification and mobility. Most sociological research takes a two-generation approach to understand social mobility from parents to children. Not until recently did mobility researchers emphasize the role of grandparents, who have become more involved in grandchildren’s lives because of increasing human longevity, declining fertility, and the growing number of single-parent families. My approach to multigenerational social mobility looks at the importance of grandparents, but also looks beyond the grandparent generation. My research has taken into account a long family history of social statuses that spans from three to more than ten generations. Findings from my research have shown that individuals’ social success is rarely predetermined, but it does depend on their social ancestry to various degrees.
My work on this project began in a collaboration with Robert Mare, whose 2010 PAA Presidential Address urged the community of demographers and social stratification researchers to consider social stratification across multiple generations. In this research, we make novel use of genealogical data that include more than 80,000 imperial and peasant families who lived during the seventeenth to twentieth centuries in China. These data provide the opportunity to study concrete examples of a wide range of multigenerational influences in individuals’ social mobility, such as the influences of parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ social statuses as well as a distant family history of extreme affluence or poverty. We also show that family mobility interacts with reproductive behaviors to jointly shape the long-run evolution of population composition. This first paper led to a two-year project funded by the National Science Foundation and a series of follow-up papers that are currently under review or in progress.
This work also motivated me to explore multigenerational social inequality, not only in terms of mobility but also demographic outcomes. In my 2015 paper with Cameron Campbell and James Lee, we introduced the number of male descendants in subsequent generations as a new social stratification outcome. Using data from more than twenty thousand patrilineal descent lines in historical China, we found that patrilineages founded by high status males had higher growth rates for the next 150 years. We also showed that the result is due more to families minimizing their probability of extinction, namely by having at least one son at each point in time, than to families maximizing their total number of sons, as suggested by previous studies. This paper provides a social stratification explanation for long-term family reproductive success, which is different from previous explanations from anthropology, biology, and economics.
Methodologically, i am interested in the "two-sex problem" in classic population and mobility modeling, which typically analyzes men and their male descendants alone while ignoring the interactions of male and female populations. In population theories, a two-sex approach takes into account the role of assortative mating between men and women in population growth, whereas in mobility studies, a two-sex approach includes effects of both paternal and maternal families in intergenerational mobility. My two-sex multigenerational approach integrates both views. Relying on empirical data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, my research shows that grandfathers and grandmothers have similar influences on the social success of their progeny. Yet a population projection shows that a lineage’s social advantages are not permanent. Generations of intermarriages between high-status and low-status families eventually connect social ancestry of all descendants in a population—a population genetics fact that leads to the identical socioeconomic distribution of descendants from all families.
Another strand of my methodological work involves developing quantitative tools for multigenerational data analysis. Some of this work builds upon various forms of Markov chains, Galton-Watson branching process, matrix population models, graphic tools for counterfactual causal analyses, and parametric and semiparametric models of growth trajectories. My hope is that these methods will invigorate the study of social mobility, one of the oldest and most important topics in sociology, changing both the way we think about social inequality and the way we study social inequality.
More about multigenerational data and methods.
I grew up during China’s economic transition from a communist regime to a market-based system. My experience growing up in a time of great institutional change motivated me to understand how these dramatic social changes influenced patterns of social status attainment, job mobility, and social inequality. My undergraduate thesis showed that while large-scale institutional change provides opportunities for social mobility for many, the already privileged benefited the most from these opportunities. Prior social status attainments are key determinants of later social status attainments, despite dramatic institutional change.
This realization induced me to shift my research interests. Rather than focusing only on the connection between individuals’ early and later life status attainments, I began to ask how privileged families also manage to maintain their social status over time, often long periods of time, despite large-scale changes in the political economy, population structures, and cultural values. I have thus extended my research into social reproduction of families across generations, and micro-macro interactions between families and institutional and population contexts of social stratification. My current research centers on understanding roles of families, lineages, and dynasties in shaping social inequality and population dynamics over decades and centuries.
Transmission of status across generations is a central concern in studies of social stratification and mobility. Most sociological research takes a two-generation approach to understand social mobility from parents to children. Not until recently did mobility researchers emphasize the role of grandparents, who have become more involved in grandchildren’s lives because of increasing human longevity, declining fertility, and the growing number of single-parent families. My approach to multigenerational social mobility looks at the importance of grandparents, but also looks beyond the grandparent generation. My research has taken into account a long family history of social statuses that spans from three to more than ten generations. Findings from my research have shown that individuals’ social success is rarely predetermined, but it does depend on their social ancestry to various degrees.
My work on this project began in a collaboration with Robert Mare, whose 2010 PAA Presidential Address urged the community of demographers and social stratification researchers to consider social stratification across multiple generations. In this research, we make novel use of genealogical data that include more than 80,000 imperial and peasant families who lived during the seventeenth to twentieth centuries in China. These data provide the opportunity to study concrete examples of a wide range of multigenerational influences in individuals’ social mobility, such as the influences of parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ social statuses as well as a distant family history of extreme affluence or poverty. We also show that family mobility interacts with reproductive behaviors to jointly shape the long-run evolution of population composition. This first paper led to a two-year project funded by the National Science Foundation and a series of follow-up papers that are currently under review or in progress.
This work also motivated me to explore multigenerational social inequality, not only in terms of mobility but also demographic outcomes. In my 2015 paper with Cameron Campbell and James Lee, we introduced the number of male descendants in subsequent generations as a new social stratification outcome. Using data from more than twenty thousand patrilineal descent lines in historical China, we found that patrilineages founded by high status males had higher growth rates for the next 150 years. We also showed that the result is due more to families minimizing their probability of extinction, namely by having at least one son at each point in time, than to families maximizing their total number of sons, as suggested by previous studies. This paper provides a social stratification explanation for long-term family reproductive success, which is different from previous explanations from anthropology, biology, and economics.
Methodologically, i am interested in the "two-sex problem" in classic population and mobility modeling, which typically analyzes men and their male descendants alone while ignoring the interactions of male and female populations. In population theories, a two-sex approach takes into account the role of assortative mating between men and women in population growth, whereas in mobility studies, a two-sex approach includes effects of both paternal and maternal families in intergenerational mobility. My two-sex multigenerational approach integrates both views. Relying on empirical data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, my research shows that grandfathers and grandmothers have similar influences on the social success of their progeny. Yet a population projection shows that a lineage’s social advantages are not permanent. Generations of intermarriages between high-status and low-status families eventually connect social ancestry of all descendants in a population—a population genetics fact that leads to the identical socioeconomic distribution of descendants from all families.
Another strand of my methodological work involves developing quantitative tools for multigenerational data analysis. Some of this work builds upon various forms of Markov chains, Galton-Watson branching process, matrix population models, graphic tools for counterfactual causal analyses, and parametric and semiparametric models of growth trajectories. My hope is that these methods will invigorate the study of social mobility, one of the oldest and most important topics in sociology, changing both the way we think about social inequality and the way we study social inequality.
More about multigenerational data and methods.
