We analyze how to best combine information on both parents’ socio-economic status (SES) in intergenerational research. This can be done by utilizing separate measures for each parent, taking averages over parents, modeling interactions, or only using the highest value across parents – the latter commonly referred to as the dominance approach. Our brief literature review suggests: (1) that the dominance tradition is widespread, although seldom theoretically or empirically justified, and (2) parental interactive models are not widely used. We assess how much of the sibling correlations in continuous measures of education, occupation, and earnings that are explained by parents’ SES in the same dimensions using the different operationalizations. The dominance approach performs poorer than other models of parental SES. For the total contribution of socioeconomic background we find a bias of about 4 to 6 percent for children’s education and occupational outcomes compared to other approaches. We also conduct a separate evaluation of nominal EGP social class operationalizations and find that the dominance approach is the most suboptimal choice compared to the alternatives. In conclusion, parental averages is preferred over dominance, as an attractive and parsimonious one variable alternative, although the highest explanatory power is attributed to models using two parental measures and an interaction term. * Corresponding author: martin.hallsten@sociology.su.se. We are grateful for comments by Robert Erikson, Per Engzell and seminar participants at the Department of Sociology/SOFI doctoral workshop in Stockholm. We also thank a number of anonymous reviewers who greatly improved the paper. This research was supported by grant 2015-01715 from the Swedish Research Council (www.vr.se).

中文翻译：

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统治的终结？分层研究中社会经济背景的评估措施

我们分析了如何在代际研究中最好地结合父母双方的社会经济地位 (SES) 信息。这可以通过对每个父项使用单独的度量、对父项取平均值、对交互进行建模或仅使用父项之间的最高值来实现——后者通常被称为优势方法。我们简短的文献综述表明：（1）支配传统很普遍，尽管很少在理论上或经验上证明是正确的，并且（2）父母互动模型没有被广泛使用。我们评估了在教育、职业和收入的连续测量中，父母的社会经济地位在相同维度上使用不同的操作来解释的兄弟相关性有多少。优势方法的表现比其他父母 SES 模型差。对于社会经济背景的总贡献，我们发现与其他方法相比，儿童教育和职业成果的偏差约为 4% 至 6%。我们还对名义 EGP 社会阶层的操作化进行了单独评估，并发现与替代方案相比，支配方法是最次优的选择。总之，父母的平均水平优于支配地位，作为一种有吸引力且简洁的变量替代方案，尽管最高的解释力归因于使用两种父母措施和一个交互项的模型。* 通讯作者：martin.hallsten@sociology.su.se。我们感谢 Robert Erikson、Per Engzell 和斯德哥尔摩社会学系/SOFI 博士研讨会的研讨会参与者的评论。我们还要感谢一些匿名审稿人，他们极大地改进了论文。这项研究得到了瑞典研究委员会 (www.vr.se) 的 2015-01715 赠款的支持。