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Aim of the paper is to provide a new class of mobility indices that takes into account the inter-temporal status movements over more than two periods of time. The index is obtained in two steps. First, an individual inter-temporal individual mobility index is provided, which allows also for analysis of upward and downward mobility. Since memory plays an important role when an individual makes comparisons with his past, a discount factor has been introduced. Secondly, individual mobility indicators are aggregated over all the population, in order to obtain an index that allows for comparisons among different societies. The empirical application analyzes the mobility of the occupational status in the Italian labour market within an inter-temporal framework, using the Italian Compulsory Communications system data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Log-linear models afford a wide range of tests regarding specific aspects of the association between two ordinal-level variables with identical attributes. This range is considerably broadened when orthogonal contrasts are used to trace changes in these aspects over time. This paper provides descriptions and graphic illustrations of six common log-linear models' applications to mobility data on U.S. white males. The models are then expanded to examine temporal variations in aspects of the mobility regime captured by the respective models. The analysis shows a significant increase over the period of study in the odds that white males from blue collar backgrounds attain higher occupational statuses. Moreover, the findings indicate that blue collar workers are more likely to be drawn from lower status origins during years of economic prosperity, and from higher status origins at times of economic dearth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various research papers regarding occupational mobility. There has been a resurgence of interest in the analysis of occupational mobility tables. One of the more exciting models which has been proposed is the structural model of researcher R.M. Hauser. Two research papers acknowledging Hauser's work have sought to develop such models further. The argument of this article, however, is that the interpretative claims made for Hauser's structural model cannot be sustained, and that accordingly analyses based upon it are misleading. The argument proceeds by initially accepting the proferred interpretation and applying the model to a set of data. This application generates a conflict. Various resolutions are explored. It is argued that were there a resolution it would have to lie with the substantive interpretability of the model, but it is further argued that the model cannot support such interpretations. The article ends by discussing the source of the indeterminacy, and suggesting an analysis strategy which would retain the odds-ratio structure of the table, as the structural model also does, but would avoid fraught decompositions.

We explore differential equations involving alcoholism, social mobility, excess female mortality, and international arms competition. In each of these instances we show that the initial equation, or system of equations, has a sociological plausibility comparable to that of the associated solutions; the solutions do indeed describe time-series trajectories that seem to represent important and unique social processes. We argue that the central challenge of differential equation modeling is to use experimentation to clarify relationships between, on the one hand, the equations and their coefficients and, on the other, the solutions and the time-series orbits created by them. Such feedback interaction of differential equations and their solutions appears to be the basis for further theoretical insight, and rapid assessments of these interactions are now possible largely because modern software encourages experimentation with many combinations of input coefficients. This paper expands on an argument made by Nielsen and Rosenfeld (1981, p. 161), who recommend that differential equations be interpreted in a way that emphasizes their solutions, i.e., the time-series trajectories of Y values, the orbits of Y , taken to represent behavior of dependent variables through time. We conclude that the most edifying interpretations of differential equations focus on the equations themselves, the resulting trajectories, the relationships between equations and trajectories, and the theoretical significance of all three. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The log-linear models has been used to advantage in several studies, particularly in the study of female occupational mobility. When the squared multiple correlation coefficient, R2 is used to measure how well a model deemed acceptable usually on the grounds of parsimony, can describe a given joint distribution, problems of interpretation can arise. The problem involves the size of R2 as a function of the number of degrees of freedom associated with an acceptable model. The author remarks that the usefulness of the shift in focus is greatest when comparing results from several different surveys of the same general configuration of variables. Models using political characteristics of voters, from four surveys were considered for predicting who voted or not. The author proposes a measure G which yields the proportion of variation explained by an accepted logit model over and above what would be explained by a minimally acceptable model. This minimally acceptable model is hypothetical, but it takes into account the degrees of freedom of the accepted model and the significance level used in the test as well as the amount of variation inherent in the particular configuration of variables.

This article presents information regarding a survey which is a part of a national survey of absenteeism and labour turnover in Ireland. Three departments of the company were examined in the study, and in these all the workers were male. Information was available for each individual in the population as to his department, type of work and absence record. A stratified sample of 48 workers was selected with equal probability from each department, stratification being according to the number and duration of absences. However, since within each department it was also necessary to have adequate representation of high and low absenteeism, a supplementary random sample of 12 was chosen from these two categories in each department. As the sample was selected on the basis of the 1969 list of employees, some workers had died. retired or been transferred when the interviewing took place in September 1970. A one-day briefing was held in late August during which the questionnaire was discussed in detail with particular reference to the open-ended questions. Interviews were arranged for the interviewers by the departmental managers, and once the worker had consented to come for interview, no refusals were encountered, therefore the non-response is not attributable to the interviewers themselves.

Over the last twenty years there have been numerous proposals about the best way to measure occupational mobility between the generations. A good deal of subsequent discussion of these indices has focussed on the fact that measures based merely on the concept of statistical independence take values which are not independent of the marginal distributions. Standard criticisms of the Durbin-Yasuda index have been that it has an unstable upper limit and that it is difficult to give the index a clear meaning except when it equals 0 or 1. In this article the author suggests that neither of these criticisms is particularly serious. This article is simply an extension of social scientists S. Yasuda's and Raymond Boudon's original discussion. It claims no originality except in being less abstract, nontechnical, and in providing a reconciliation of alternative ways of characterizing mobility matrices. The definition of structural mobility is strictly formal and does not address the problem of how the occupational structure was in fact transformed.

The shortcomings of currently used social mobility measures are examined in the context of cross-national comparisons. A new framework is presented which allows the development of measures which are insensitive to the margins, independent of the occupational categories used, and make use of all the information in the mobility matrix. Measures based on this approach are calculated for nineteen countries and it is found that mobility rates at different levels in the social hierarchy are not very highly correlated, particularly for Hungary, Denmark, Italy and the Philippines. The results indicate that circulation mobility is correlated positively with structural mobility for the industrial countries considered, and negatively for the nonindustrial countries.