ASSOCIATIONAL CONTIGUITY.

This article focuses on a statistical method of graph associational distances between occupations, devised by sociologist Edward Laumann and Louis Guttman. However, they do not seem to be aware of the very serious but easily correctable misuse of the method, which lies in the relative sizes of occupational categories. The method of smallest space analysis used by Laumann and Guttman graphs, in the fewest number of dimensions with as few errors as possible, is a set of associational distances between occupations, where members of occupations which are "close" to each other are likely to associate with each other and members of occupations which are "distant" are unlikely to associate with each other. Once one has the positions of occupations in the space one can interpret clusters of occupations or the dimensions of the space. This is similar in some ways to factor analysis, which might be looked at as graphing the relationships between variables expressed in a correlation matrix. Moreover, the difficulty with the application of the method by Laumann and Guttman is that they do not take into account the effects of sizes of occupational categories. If an occupation is numerically large in the population, either because it really is large or because many occupations have been grouped into one category, many people will have important alters in that category just as a consequence of that category's size.