ABSTRACT
People's movements up and down the social ladder of the society they are living in have remained one of the classic sociological topics since the time of the Russian sociologist Sorokin and his work Social Mobility. However, this original point of departure also laid the ground for a rather dominating way of approaching the phenomenon of social mobility: as vertical movements taking place within occupational positions. In regard to methods typically applied in social mobility research, the last decades have revealed the development of increasingly advanced statistical methods. These methods are criticized for playing a too dominating role in this field by life course researchers using a qualitative approach to social mobility. Looking then at the way they try to change the downward course of their social position and particularly when this seems to point to a more permanent change they find different country specific ways of handling this.
