Do jobs run in families?

https://research.facebook.com/blog/do-jobs-run-in-families-/

by ironmantra • 10 years ago

68 30 10 years ago

research.facebook.com

This data is pretty interesting. Of course, it's hard to separate out or even infer the causes as nature vs. nurture (which the article is careful about) but the part about twins was the most striking for me:

"Twins' tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more striking."

A possible explanation was provided above:

"Whether identical or fraternal 2, twins are also more likely to be raised in a similar environment — parenting styles may differ as a parents add more children to their brood, but twins will likely be exposed to a similar parenting style."

Also, being raised in the same time period would also expose you to the same cultural/economic/societal factors - all of which can change with time, and also may affect your choice of career. (i.e. the proportion of math_CS parents could be different from the proportion of math_CS children just because of the different time periods in which each grew up)

aab0• 10 years ago

Of course, it's hard to separate out or even infer the causes as nature vs. nurture (which the article is careful about) but the part about twins was the most striking for me:

If you look, they already give you enough to get an idea of the relative contributions:

15% of siblings share an occupation, which is higher than the 8.6% rate for any two same-gender, same-age individuals in the population. Twins' tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more striking.

So siblings have twice the rate of random people, and identical twins have twice the rate of siblings. Since twins have twice the genetics as well, this points to high heritability and (probably) lower shared environment.

3pt14159• 10 years ago

There are twins separated at births studies that show _striking_ similarities between identical twins. Even when twins are brought up in different environments (income, ethnicity) their choices, intelligence, and divorce rates have a higher r^2 than non-twin siblings brought up within the same household.

grinnbearit• 10 years ago

Here's an interesting video that takes that into account.

Twins, even those that grow up separately, are remarkably similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDFh74eENuw

raister• 10 years ago

that is very cute: fb doing research!

devishard• 10 years ago

I'm not sure what you're saying here; Facebook does more research than some universities. Their propensity for experimenting on their users is well-documented, and while I disagree with their ethics, they do produce significant, relevant and valid results.

jacquesm4• 10 years ago

If you're prepared to toss ethics overboard it's not that hard to come up with significant, relevant and valid results. The whole trick is to get those results while acting ethical.

dmxt• 10 years ago

Interesting data. I think we'll get very interesting data from Facebook if they keep it up, considering they're one of companies who have the most data on people.

wbillingsley• 10 years ago

A little uncomfortable that a company that spends $10m lobbying the government in its interests, is also now doing social policy research using their near-monopoly on a particular sort of people's data. (This one, for instance, ties into social mobility which is always an argument that has currency with politicians.) Quite what they're arguing for behind the scenes is unknown ... but then that's part of the problem.

smt88• 10 years ago

There's no "policy" to this research

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

They're using this data for incredibly accurate targeting, allowing advertisers to effectively target race/ethnicities: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/18/facebook-showed-us-...

I wrote a proof of concept on it last year too: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil

traek• 10 years ago

The interactive visualization is very neat. Interesting data, and an interesting way of presenting the data.

jacquesm4• 10 years ago

https://lornareiko.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/identical-twins-...

http://articles.philly.com/1990-11-04/news/25926164_1_identi...

kelukelugames• 10 years ago

I think father-daughter and mother-son is interesting too.

Did they run something like TF-IDF to normalize for popular occupations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

__john• 10 years ago

That yellow when you hover over medicine/office contrasts very poorly w/ the white background.

cheez2• 10 years ago

Is it just me or is the data presentation completely terrible

mateo411• 10 years ago

I thought the data visualization was pretty good. How would you improve it?

A profession by profession table with the raw numbers would be more useful. Perhaps a Hinton Diagram would be a better visualization.

kylec• 10 years ago

It's very hard to get a sense of how more or less likely a child is to pursue a given profession than normal. You just sort of have to eyeball the bars before and after, which tends to visually accentuate changes to common professions, even when there might be a much larger percentage change for an uncommon profession.

cheez2• 10 years ago

It depends on what you want to convey. For example, as a layman and someone who likes structured data, I want to find out "what are the top professions for the offspring of profession X"? To me, this screams like a sorted table of some kind with a selection.

The relative sized bars are cool in terms of animation but man, they are a pain to read.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

Related: Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises

https://www.worldcat.org/title/son-also-rises-surnames-and-t...

(And yes, Clark's got a thing for very bad Hemmingway puns.)

jseliger• 10 years ago

This certainly makes sense: "To conclude, we see that people within a family are proportionally more likely to eventually also choose the same occupation." Still, I wonder if it has become less common with time: the idea of a parent (usually a father) passing the family trade on to the child isn't culturally common, as it used to be during the guild era that got started in the Middle Ages.

On an anecdotal level, I got started as a grant writing consultant because my parents started the business when I was a kid (I wrote a little more about that here: http://seliger.com/about/). But while I became interested i the business as a teenager, neither of my siblings did, and they both work in unrelated fields.

I also feel like I've met a disproportionate number of doctors whose parents were doctors. It does seem like they'd pick up a fair amount of useful information just listening to their parents talk.

hrktb• 10 years ago

I think it can be less subtle than that. For instance a piano solist will 'test' children inclinement to play music, or more directly to play piano. I know other engineers who also expose their kids to programming like games to see if there is potential.

It doesn't mean the trade will be passed down as is, but if a kid seems predisposed for a field, the parent with expertise will help it grow further as long as the kid enjoys it.

exelius• 10 years ago

This makes total sense -- you do what you know. As a child growing up, you emulate your parents in a lot of ways. If your parents are factory workers, they probably didn't push you towards college so you will end up in a similar job. Likewise, if your parents are doctors, you not only have a path to medical school laid out before you, you likely have connections that would give you a better than average chance of acceptance.

Good to see this proven out with data; but I'd consider this a pretty intuitive conclusion.

untog• 10 years ago

I imagine the march of technological progress and America's shifts in employment mean it is a lot less prevalent than it was a generation or so ago - a lot fewer children following their parent into manufacturing jobs.

That said, my Dad worked in computing - not as a coder, just as a manager, but it meant that we had an early proto-PC, a 2,400 baud modem and a CompuServe connection. It was probably inevitable that I would end up doing something with computers...

jameshart• 10 years ago

Why are all the resultsets segregated by gender? The description of the problem they were looking to solve gave no indication that gender was of interest to them in analyzing the results.

Do jobs run in families?

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