The question of how social mobility affects outcomes, such as political preferences, wellbeing, and fertility, has long been of interest to sociologists. But finding answers to this question has been plagued by, on the one hand, the non-identifiability of “mobility effects” as they are usually conceived in this literature, and, on the other, the fact that these “effects” are, in reality, partial associations which may or may not represent causal relationships. We advance a different approach, drawing on a causal framework that sees the destination categories as treatments whose effects may be heterogeneous across origin categories. Our view is that most substantive hypotheses have in mind a hypothetical within-person comparison, rather than a between-person comparison. This approach is not subject to many of the problematic issues that have beset earlier attempts to formulate a model of mobility effects, and it places the study of such effects on a more reliably causal footing. We show how our approach relates to previous attempts to model mobility effects and explain how it differs both conceptually and empirically. We illustrate our approach using political preference data from the United Kingdom.

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社会学家长期以来一直对社会流动性如何影响政治偏好、福祉和生育率等结果的问题感兴趣。但寻找这个问题的答案一直受到困扰，一方面，这些文献中通常设想的“流动性效应”的不可识别性，另一方面，这些“效应”是在现实中的部分关联可能代表也可能不代表因果关系。我们提出了一种不同的方法，利用因果框架，将目的地类别视为治疗方法，其效果可能因来源类别而异。我们的观点是，大多数实质性假设考虑的是假设的人内比较，而不是人与人之间的比较。这种方法不受早期试图制定流动效应模型的许多问题的影响，并且它将对此类效应的研究置于更可靠的因果基础上。我们展示了我们的方法与之前模拟流动性效应的尝试如何相关，并解释了它在概念上和经验上的差异。我们使用英国的政治偏好数据来说明我们的方法。

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