How Destination Depends on Origin in the Occupational Mobility Table

Abstract

A reanalysis of the expanded version of the 1949 British cross-classification table of respondent's occupation by father's occupation features two models that emphasize the "achievement" rather than the "mobility" point of view hitherto taken in contingency-table analysis of such data. The new models are attractive in terms of mathematical parsimony, statistical goodness of fit, conceptual clarity, and suitability for application in comparative work. The favorable results are attributed partly to the fairly substantial degree of disaggregation of occupation categories. The models capture some of the flavor of the regression approach to mobility in that they show in straighforward manner how the destination distribution is shifted for each shift of one or more steps on the scale of occupational origins.