Social Mobility: Actual, Perceived, and Equitable.

From the theoretical standpoint, this paper attempts to integrate the objective, cognitive and normative dimensions of social mobility. This integration is based on a comparison of the matrices of actual, perceived and equitable frequencies of transitions between origins and destinations. The ratios of compared frequencies operationally define the degree of false consciousness, feeling of injustice and illegitimacy in the domain of social mobility. From the methodological standpoint we propose a practical method for ascertaining cognitive and normative mobility frequencies. In this paper we used average frequencies for the entire sample, although an analysis of individual images and preferences of mobility frequencies can be performed. This extension would seem particularly useful for heterogeneous samples with respect to the social positions of the respondents. From the empirical standpoint we have demonstrated that, net of marginal effects, the matrices of actual, perceived and equitable mobility do not differ very much from each other, at least in terms of the goodness of fit. Within a small range of differences the measure of false consciousness has a smaller value than the measure of illegitimacy, which is still smaller than the measure of the feeling of injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]