Status Attainment

Sociologists have for a long time been anxious to understand why some individual achieve success and others fail. As a sub-classification of questions surrounding social mobility, the specific issue of "status attainment" was first formulated by the pioneer work of Blau and Duncan (1967). They asserted that the best question to ask is not "How are people mobile?" but rather "How do people attain their statuses?" (Stark, 1996, p. 280). Their revised question enabled researchers to ascertain "how people acquire a status with or without being mobile" (Stark, 1996, p. 200). Since Blau and Duncan's landmark study and their presentation of an initial research model into this sociological field of inquiry, additional variables have been included to both broaden and intensify the field. One factor which appears to need additional scrutiny is the issue of mentor availability. If status attainment is to be at least partially identified as acquiring a better societal position than one's parents than additional research is needed to show how individuals fare once they are ushered into arenas which can provide access to upward mobility. If individuals are granted access to increased educational opportunities and on-site job opportunities but then blocked from advancement from within these societal structures, then no true alteration of social status can be achieved. To focus on both positive and negative models of mentor patterning

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nd so he was eager to duplicate Blau and Duncan's study in Canada. Fortunately for the advancement of social research, his ambitions were delayed sufficiently long enough so that when his study began he understood the importance of including women. By the 70s, it was "feasible and important to include women in such a study" (Stark, 1996, p. 282). Significantly, the research which Porter prodded and loosely supervised over the next dozen or so years turned up results at odds with Porter's own published opinions. The results of the 1973 Canadian study indicated that "Canada was not an exception to Lipset and Bendix's proposition that social mobility is high in all industrialized nations" (Stark, 1996, p. 283). Canada shares an equally high level of social mobility with America establishing a perfect parallel of .40 for the correlationship between father and son's occupational prestige. In regards to education and occupational prestige, the results are still nearly parallel with .60 for the US and .61 for Canada (Stark, 1996, p. 283). The national study prodded by Porter indicated some interesting observations regarding women and status attainment. Canadian women who held full-time jobs emerged from families with higher-statu
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Approximate Word count = 1543
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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