Social Mobility Measures for Cross-National Comparisons.

A number of extensive cross-national comparisons of intergenerational social mobility have been carried out. Most comparisons to date have collapsed the mobility matrix to two categories, manual and non-manual, or three, if agricultural is included, and have used the odds ratio as the basis for mobility measures. However, this is based on only a small part of the mobility that has taken place, since most mobility is short-distance. The aim here is to propose a flexible framework within which social mobility measures can be defined which are insensitive to the margins, independent of the occupational categories used, and reflect all the mobility which has taken place. In the glissando case this is achieved by looking at the underlying distribution directly, which does not seem to have been done before. It is assumed that individuals can be ranked in descending order of occupational status (with ties allowed). The ranks are scaled so that the highest is 0 and the lowest 1. Researchers distinguished between societies whose social stratification system is a "glissando" and those in which social position is defined reasonably clearly along class lines, with a small number of discrete classes having fairly uniform economic rewards in each.