Doctoral Dissertation Research: Within-Group Inequality

The growth of income inequality has fast become one of the central concerns of American society. While this growth has renewed scholarly and popular interest in the causes and consequences of inequality, the nature of inequality growth presents a challenge to social scientists and policy makers. A central component of this contemporary upswing is within-group inequality, or inequality of wages and income occurring among individuals and households who are otherwise similar on those characteristics which social scientists typically study, such as sex, race, educational attainment, household composition, and job characteristics. This project examines the growth of within-group income inequality by incorporating structural and temporal characteristics of the individual life course and the social context into within-group inequality analysis.

This dissertation will help identify mechanisms influencing the growth of within-group inequality as well as critically examine previous explanations of within-group inequality using three levels of analysis: the individual level by examining life course trajectories, the country level by comparing within-group inequality between the United States and other rich western countries, and the meso (middle) level by examining within-group inequality in relation to characteristics of local labor markets. Statistical analysis will be conducted using three high quality datasets: the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Luxembourg Income Study, and US Census microdata in conjunction with multiple secondary sources of contextual data. The project also will use state-of-the-art statistical methodological techniques to test hypotheses including heteroscedastic regression models, repeated measures multilevel models, and growth trajectory models. Results will provide a critical assessment of existing theories of within-group inequality. This dissertation will also extend the study of within-group inequality toward a longitudinal and multilevel framework, allowing for the incorporation of macrosociological theories into the study of within-group inequality. The project will not only provide theoretical and methodological contributions for social scientists, but also will provide broader high-quality information for policy makers as well.