Measuring the Permeability of Occupational Structures: An Information-Theoretic Approach

Methods deriving from information theory are proposed for the analysis of social mobility matrices. They permit us to give quantitative answers to such questionsas, "Given a man's social origin, how much uncertainty is there about what his own social position will be?" Other methods would undoubtedly be more appropriate whenever social positions are measured on an interval scale, but the assumptions they require are often implausible. The methods herein are designed for the more usual situation where positions are merely grouped in categories which may not even form an ordinal scale: nominal scale data are treated as nominal scale data. These methods are used to re-analyze several intergenerational occupational mobility matrices which appear in the literature and to make comparisons between such matrices.