Xi Song is the Schiffman Family Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology and a faculty member of the Graduate Group in Demography at University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an Associate Director of the Penn Population Studies Center and a faculty affiliate of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health, and Data Science in Germany.
Ph.D. Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
M.S. Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013
M.PHIL, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2010
B.A. Renmin University of China, 2008
Her research interests include social mobility, occupations and work, Asian Americans, population studies, and quantitative methodology. She is currently working on two major projects. The first investigates occupational restructuring in the U.S. and its consequences for the future of work. Her analysis focuses on shifting patterns and determinants of career progression — through changes in jobs, occupations, employers, organizations, and earnings — that vary across workers and over their life courses. As part of this work, she developed a new occupational percentile rank measure that accounts for changes in occupational structure over time, driven by shifts in occupational size and educational composition. This index is available for download here .
Her second project investigates Asian Americans and the historical origins of the “Model Minority” narrative. It focuses on the evolving educational and labor market outcomes, as well as intergenerational mobility of Asian Americans from the Asian Exclusion Period (1882-1942) to the present. The findings highlight socioeconomic domains where Asian Americans have reached parity with Whites and where a “bamboo ceiling” persists, despite their high levels of education, experience, and performance. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation .
Song’s early work explored the conditions under which families rise and fall across multiple generations — why do some families successfully preserve their advantages while others fall into poverty or experience downward mobility after a certain number of generations? What strategies do elite families adopt to maintain their growth and sustainability? She answered these broad questions by combining data sources from linked censuses, longitudinal surveys, family genealogies, and administrative and business records. This research developed a complex, dynamic view of how individuals, families, and organizations create and reproduce economic advantages.
As a quantitative methodologist, Song has developed Markov chain demography models for genealogical processes, population estimation methods for overlapping generations, the extended Goodman-Keyfitz-Pullum kinship model with time-varying rates, multivariate mixed-effects location-scale models for inter- and multigenerational data, and weighting methods for reconciling prospective and retrospective mobility estimates. She is currently working on occupation and industry write-in auto-coding using machine learning methods.
Song received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her publications received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (ISA-RC28), the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), and the Demographic Research. She received the Mentor of the Year Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Sociological Methodology, Social Science Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
SOCI 6620/CRIM 6620/DEMG 6620 Panel Data Analysis
SOCI 6120/DEMG 6120 Categorical Data Analysis
SOCI 1050 Social Stratification
Song, Xi and Hal Caswell. forthcoming. “The Role of Kinship in Racial Differences in Exposure to Unemployment.” Demography.
Xie, Yu, Hao Dong, Xiang Zhou, and Xi Song. 2022. “Trends in Social Mobility in Post-Revolution China.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119(7): e2117471119.
Caswell, Hal and Xi Song. 2021. “Kinship Dynamics with Time-Varying Demographic Rates.” Demographic Research. 45(16):517–546.
Song, Xi. 2021. “Multigenerational Social Mobility: A Demographic Approach.” Sociological Methodology 51(1):1–43.
Song, Xi, Catherine G. Massey, Karen A. Rolf, Joseph P. Ferrie, Jonathan L. Rothbaum, and Yu Xie. 2020. “Long-Term Decline in Intergenerational Social Mobility in the United States, 1850–2015.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117(1):251–258
Song, Xi and Robert D. Mare. 2019. Shared Lifetimes, Multigenerational Exposure, and Educational Mobility. Demography 56(3): 891—916.
Brand, Jennie E., Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, and Yu Xie. 2019. Parental Divorce Is Not Uniformly Negative for Children’s Educational Attainment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(15): 7266—7271.
Brand, Jennie E., Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, and Yu Xie. 2019. Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis. Sociological Science 6: 264–292.
Javis, Benjamin F. and Xi Song. 2017. Rising Intragenerational Occupational Mobility in the United States, 1969—2011. American Sociological Review 82(3): 568—599.
Song, Xi and Cameron D. Campbell. 2017. Genealogical Microdata and Their Significance for Social Science. Annual Review of Sociology 43: 75—99.
Song, Xi and Robert D. Mare. 2017. Short-Term and Long-Term Educational Mobility of Families: A Two-Sex Approach. Demography 54(1): 145—173.
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