Kerckhoff, Alan C.

Alan Kerckhoff (1924–2001) was an American sociologist noted for his contributions to sociology of education through his work on the status attainment model, examining how structural conditions affect education and labor force outcomes. He applied these models cross-culturally, comparing intergenerational and career mobility rates and patterns across Western industrial societies, namely the United States and Great Britain, and later, with France and Germany.

Kerckhoff's work comes out of the status attainment literature of the 1960s, taking Peter Blau's and Otis Duncan's model of status attainment as a starting point for many of his analyses. In the original model, socioeconomic status was linked to educational attainment, and then both were linked to first and subsequent occupational attainments. Early elaborations of this, namely the Wisconsin model, included social-psychological ...