Analyzing Inequality summarizes key issues in today's theoretically guided empirical research on social inequality, life course, and cross-national comparative sociology. It describes the progress made in terms of data sources, both cross-sectional and longitudinal; the new instruments that make inequality research possible; new ways of thinking and explaining; and empirical findings or important contributions of rigorous empirical research to our understanding. The chapters, each written by a distinguished social scientist, are of interest to both scholars and students. This is the only book to date to take stock of the state of the art in stratification research, examining data, methods, theory, and new empirical findings. Analyzing Inequality offers an unusually and impressively broad coverage of substantive topics in the field.