Abstract

New Zealand, like many countries, is facing significant social and economic challenges including an aging population and high child poverty among our fastest growing ethnic groups. Understanding intergenerational social mobility, or the extent to which later-life socioeconomic status is tied to parental socioeconomic status is crucial for addressing these challenges. Research on intergenerational mobility, including ethnic differences, is often constrained by the availability of suitable data. Increasingly, administrative data has been used for intergenerational mobility research as it can provide good coverage of populations and diversity within populations.
Our recently funded research project examines intergenerational mobility in New Zealand using data sources within Stats NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) – a research database of linked de-identified census, administrative, and survey data about people and households. The project aims to document patterns of mobility and factors associated with upward and downward mobility in New Zealand, while also producing technical information for later intergenerational research projects. This presentation will highlight the potential of the IDI to explore intergenerational social mobility at a national and ethnic sub-population level. In the first phase of the project presented here, we establish parent-child pairs using birth records, and supplement this with census, social welfare, immigration, and death and marriage data sources. We then document the proportion of parent-child pairs with available socioeconomic data (education and income) by birth year and ethnicity from approximately 1976 onwards.
This will identify for whom intergenerational analysis is currently viable (i.e., for which birth years/cohorts) using IDI data, limitations of the current data, but also where capability will increase with time as data collections span more generations. The resulting information and data will provide the foundation for analytic models of intergenerational social mobility for the remainder of the research programme. These will assess factors associated with upward and downward mobility.