We use data from multiple sources to test how social mobility affects people’s experiences at selective universities, their interactions with their children, and their health. These include data from the Penn Undergraduate Belonging Study (Penn UBelong), which studied experiences of belonging among 300 first-generation-to-college and continuing-generation students, and data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which is a prospective, longitudinal study of over 20,000 individuals who were nationally representative of adolescents in the United States when the study began in the mid-1990s. The Penn Ubelong Study was generously funded by a Klein Family Social Justice Grant.
In a recent meta-analysis conducted by PhD student Samiha Islam, we found that upwardly mobile individuals reported more mental health problems than individuals with stable and high SES, but fewer mental health problems than individuals who were downwardly mobile or whose SES was stable and low. Results highlight the importance of taking a life course perspective to understand the relationship between socioeconomic status and mental health.
