Social Status Attainment during the Transition to Adulthood

Camillia Lui, University of California, Berkeley

This paper examines social status attainment during the transition to adulthood in the domains of economic and human capital, using three waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Through a person-oriented approach, latent class analysis (LCA) captured the ebb and flow of social status advantages and disadvantages from adolescence (Wave I), young adulthood (Wave III) to adulthood (Wave IV). LCA models revealed four latent groups for economic capital and five groups for human capital. For each domain, there were groups of persistently low and persistently high capital during the transition to adulthood. Evidence of social mobility was most prominent for economic capital (e.g., groups of downward and upward mobility) compared to human capital (e.g., upwardly mobile group). These findings emphasize the importance of examining social status as a life-course construct during the transition to adulthood.