The professional career of sociologists: a graphical chain model reflecting early influences and associations

Currently, German universities take great interest in how their
students perform in later professional life. Information on early
determinants of success is needed in order to adjust educational
programs and to cope more easily with the expected increase in the
number of students in the coming years. In this paper we analyze
data on the occupational careers of sociologists. The complexity of
the underlying research question is taken into account by modelling
the associations using so--called graphical chain models. These
models are in general constructed such that conditional
independencies can be concluded from the corresponding graph. We
present the different steps in formulating the dependence
structure. For checking its appropriateness, a model selection
strategy is applied based on regression techniques. The final graph
gives essential hints with respect to early determinants for
professional success.