The social psychological legacy of Otis Dudley Duncan

Through his extensive analysis of the “socioeconomic life cycle,” of the “process of stratification,” and his pioneering use of path and structural equation models as tools of theory building, Dudley Duncan contributed to the early foundations of contemporary life course sociology and to a social psychology of social mobility. We illustrate these pioneering contributions in Duncan's research on race and poverty, intelligence and IQ, and achievement motivation, showing his creative blend of social demography with a speculative “psychosociology” of inequality and intergenerational mobility.