Models of Status Inconsistency and Social Mobility Effects

The author draws out the conceptual implications of technical procedures which he employed in an published in this journal (Hope, 1971). He defends an earlier statement of status-inconsistency theory (Lenski, 1954; 1956) against attacks on its coherence, and he provides a model which accurately represents the theory (and an equivalent theory of mobility effects) and may be used to test it. By contrast with this diamond model, he shows that the usual model cannot test for the presence of status inconsistency or mobility effects, whether these are defined additively or interactively. The technique of design matrix regression analysis is introduced as a means for exploring the relations between models in order to grasp their structure and implications before they are fitted to data. The square-additive model is criticized for its conceptual vagueness, but a theoretical position is suggested which incorporates the main positive feature of the model while constituting a worthy rival to inconsistency theory.