A Research Note: A Social Structural Model for the Socioeconomic Career

Among a subset of the white male metropolitan population in the years 1957-67, the process of socioeconomic achievement is examined. These longitudinal data on occupational and economic attainment provide comparisons between synthetic cohort and real cohort models of achievement through the middle of the work career. Structural models of career achievement which fail to represent the "historical" quality of work careers ar incomplete. In more elaborated casual models of the process of achievement, the roles of paternal occupation, respondent's education, and prior occupational and income attainments are summarized. Fuller details of the data from which this note was drawn appear in Featherman (1969,1971).