Lewis R Anderson | University of Oxford (original) (raw)

Papers by Lewis R Anderson

SocArxiv, 2022

I review social, economic, and policy trends across education, employment, housing, and wealth in... more I review social, economic, and policy trends across education, employment, housing, and wealth in the UK over the past half-century, and compare how different generations have fared in each of these areas. Younger generations cannot be said to have had it wholly ‘better’ or ‘worse’, but a recurrent finding is a decline in the opportunities available in all these areas to young people who do not enter higher education and lack other advantages such as access to parental wealth. Among the likely ongoing consequences of this decline are a less open society, lower productivity, and lower fertility.
Chapter 6, starting on page 81, gives a more substantial summary of the report.
This work was commissioned by The Future is Bright Charitable Trust, whose goal is to mobilise older generations to help pass on opportunities to young people. In this spirit, chapter 6 ends by offering suggestions for individual action with respect to education and employment, housing, and investment.

Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 2022

Depressive symptoms are disproportionately high among women and less educated individuals. One me... more Depressive symptoms are disproportionately high among women and less educated individuals. One mechanism proposed to explain this is the differential vulnerability hypothesis—that these groups experience particularly strong increases in symptoms in response to stressful life events. We identify limitations to prior work and present evidence from a new approach to life stress research using the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Preliminarily, we replicate prior findings of differential vulnerability in between-individual models. Harnessing repeated measures, however, we show that apparent findings of differential vulnerability by both sex and education are artifacts of confounding. Men and women experience similar average increases in depressive symptoms after stressful life events. One exception is tentative evidence for a stronger association among women for events occurring to others in the household. We term this the “female vulnerability to network events” hypothesis and discuss with reference to Kessler and McLeod’s related “cost of caring” hypothesis. [Open access.]

Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2021

How, and at what stage of the adult lifecourse, does the association between income and mental he... more How, and at what stage of the adult lifecourse, does the association between income and mental health problems arise? Research mostly tests whether mechanisms of social causation or health selection are evident in a given sample. I test for these mechanisms, and the contribution of unobserved heterogeneity, but additionally explore the extent to which each contributes to growth in social inequality in mental health, specifically symptoms of depression and anxiety and their negative correlation with household income. Using Understanding Society data, I first show that inequality in mental health among adults emerges around ages 20–30 and then persists, only weakening from around 60. Inequality is much lower controlling for employment. Next, I apply a novel fixed-effects longitudinal structural equation model to test three mechanisms generating growth of this inequality, operationalising social causation and health selection through employment transitions. While leaving employment exhibits a negative association with subsequent mental health, neither this mechanism nor the reverse – health selection out of employment – can account for growth in mental health inequality. Rather, only unobserved heterogeneity between individuals accounts for a substantial portion of this growth – around a third. This result is similar for men and women and across age groups. These findings lend support to the relatively neglected indirect health selection hypothesis, and indicate that a priority for future work should be to more clearly delineate what sorts of relatively fixed characteristics of individuals might matter, through what sorts of pathways, and how these characteristics are moulded across childhood and adolescence.

European Sociological Review, 2021

A now-substantial literature claims that job loss and union dissolution (the end of a marriage or... more A now-substantial literature claims that job loss and union dissolution (the end of a marriage or cohabiting relationship) each increase individuals’ risk of the other, highlighting that major negative life events in the labour market and family can spill over across domains. We address three limitations of this research using UK data. First, these associations might arise from unmeasured factors which jointly predispose individuals to the two events. Second, the distinction between job loss (an event) and unemployment (the state it may lead to) has been neglected. Third, where the impact of unemployment has been considered, its duration has not. We simultaneously model both processes: does job loss (or being unemployed) lead to union dissolution, and does union dissolution (or being divorced/separated) lead to job loss? To investigate the role of unobserved, time-invariant confounders, we model the individual-specific effects as random variables allowed to correlate across the models for the two outcomes. Upon allowing such cross-process correlations, we find that job loss and union dissolution have modest and non-significant prospective associations with one another. We also find no support for a connection between being divorced/separated and subsequent job loss. Unemployment appears to increase risk of union dissolution; by attending to duration we uncover gender differences in this relationship.

DIAL Working Paper Series 16/2019, 2019

Individuals exposed to both job loss and marital dissolution are likely to be highly disadvantage... more Individuals exposed to both job loss and marital dissolution are likely to be highly disadvantaged, having experienced stresses and losses in the two primary domains of life. Moreover, recent literature finds that exposure to one event tends to increase the risk of the other. However, next to nothing is known about the size or composition – or changes therein – of the divorced/separated and unemployed (DSU) subpopulation. Using large, nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional datasets extending back to 1984, we aim to fill this gap for the UK. We give a descriptive account of the prevalence and social distribution of DSU, and of the cross-sectional association between its two component states: among which groups, by education and gender, does being either divorced/separated or unemployed most strongly imply a heightened risk of also being the other, and how has this changed over time? We find stable and strong educational inequality in DSU, while the gender gap has narrowed and recently closed. The association between the two states is stronger among men; has weakened strikingly over the time period we consider, for both men and, especially, women; and is educationally stratified among men but not women. Contrary to expectations, higher-educated men in one of the two states are most likely to also be in the other. Possible explanations and further questions are discussed. In particular, we highlight the possibility that over this time period the divorced/separated have become more like the general population, rather than a negatively selected subgroup among whom unemployment is a particular risk.

Sociological Science, 2018

Are educational outcomes subject to a “grandparent effect”? We comprehensively and critically rev... more Are educational outcomes subject to a “grandparent effect”? We comprehensively and critically review the growing literature on this question. Fifty-eight percent of 69 analyses report that grandparents’ (G1) socioeconomic characteristics are associated with children’s (G3) educational outcomes, independently of the characteristics of parents (G2). This is not clearly patterned by study characteristics, except sample size. The median ratio of G2:G1 strength of association with outcomes is 4.1, implying that grandparents matter around a quarter as much as parents for education. On average, 30 percent of the bivariate G1–G3 association remains once G2 information is included. Grandparents appear to be especially important where G2 socioeconomic resources are low, supporting the compensation hypothesis. We further discuss whether particular grandparents matter, the role of assortative mating, and the hypothesis that G1–G3 associations should be stronger where there is (more) G1–G3 contact, for which repeated null findings are reported. We recommend that measures of social origin include information on grandparents.

Social Science & Medicine, 2018

According to the health selection hypothesis, poor mental health and behavioural problems in adol... more According to the health selection hypothesis, poor mental health and behavioural problems in adolescence limit socioeconomic attainment. But to what extent is health selection driven by prior social causation? This paper quantifies the extent to which health selection – here, restricted or downward intergenerational social class mobility due to poor mental health or behavioural problems – can be attributed to the influence of modifiable childhood risk factors. The UK National Child Development Study provides measures of socioeconomic deprivation and childhood adversities, as well as multiple-informant ratings of adolescents' mental health and behavioural problems, for which confirmatory factor analysis supports a three-factor model. Decomposition analysis is used to robustly assess the extent of attenuation of selection effects when conditioning on the childhood environment. Conduct problems, hyperactivity, and to a lesser extent emotional symptoms at age 16 are associated with individuals’ chances of achieving (un)desirable mobility outcomes. When prior childhood risk factors are taken into account, the association of conduct problems with mobility is attenuated by around 50%, indicating a substantial role for confounding and earlier processes of social causation in the generation of this health selection effect. Further analyses indicate that this attenuation is greater for those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and is mostly driven by the inclusion of indicators of generalised disadvantage such as crowded housing and low income. On the other hand, the effects of emotional symptoms and hyperactivity on mobility outcomes are not significantly accounted for by childhood risk factors. This study adds to the health inequalities literature by interrogating the empirical validity of the usual interpretation of health selection effects as indicating the causal priority of the onset of poor mental health.

Centre for Social Investigation: Briefing Note 19

- Over the past half-century, social class inequality in the probability of an 11-year-old having... more - Over the past half-century, social class inequality in the probability of an 11-year-old having a high level of conduct problems (in the top 10% of their cohort) has increased sharply.
- Working class children now appear nearly four times as likely to be among those with the worst conduct problems, compared with those from the most advantaged backgrounds.
- Similarly, the probability of an 11-year-old having a high level of emotional symptoms has become more closely linked to parental social class background, though the increase is less drastic. In 1969 the social classes had actually been equal in this respect.
- Hyperactivity shows a similar pattern, with slight inequality among those born in 1958, and higher levels since.
- Children of the unemployed or economically inactive (mostly in single-parent households) tend to fare worst in these areas, although we only have good data for the most recent generation.