Compara mètodes

	Surname-Based Mobility Analysis	Quantitative Prosopography
Camp	Social History	Social History
Família	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Any d'origen	2014	1971
Autor original	Gregory Clark	Lawrence Stone (programmatic statement); roots in Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme
Tipus	regression-estimation	network-tabular
Font seminal	Clark, G. (2014). The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691162546	Abramitzky, R., Boustan, L., Eriksson, K., Feigenbaum, J., & Perez, S. (2021). Automated Linking of Historical Data. Journal of Economic Literature, 59(3), 865-918.
Àlies	Clark surname method, Group surname mobility, Surname-group status persistence, Implied intergenerational elasticity	Collective biography, Prosopographical network analysis, Large-scale biographical databases, Career-sequence prosopography
Relacionats	3	3
Resum	Surname-based mobility analysis estimates how strongly social status is inherited across generations without linking a single parent to a single child. Developed by Gregory Clark, it exploits the fact that surnames cluster: certain names were borne disproportionately by elites, others by the poor. By tracking how over-represented or under-represented a surname group is among elites, university graduates, physicians, attorneys, the wealthy, across successive generations, one observes how fast that group's relative status regresses toward the population mean. The speed of regression yields an estimate of underlying intergenerational persistence, conventionally denoted b. Clark's striking and contested finding is that this group-level b is far higher, around 0.7 to 0.8, than the 0.3 to 0.5 typically found by conventional parent-child studies, implying that the deep, latent component of social status is far stickier than single-generation correlations suggest. The method extends mobility measurement into eras and places where individual linkage is impossible.	Quantitative prosopography studies a historical group by investigating the common characteristics of its members through a collective analysis of their lives. Rather than writing one biography, the prosopographer defines a population, members of a parliament, a senate, a profession, a religious order, and poses a uniform set of questions to each life: social origins, education, marriage and kin, offices held, wealth, career path. The answers, encoded as structured data, are then analysed statistically and, increasingly, as networks, mapping the kinship, patronage, and office-holding ties that bound the group together. Programmatically articulated by Lawrence Stone and rooted in the work of Namier on Parliament and Syme on the Roman aristocracy, the method turns scattered biographical detail into comparable variables and relational graphs. In its modern, database-driven form it joins large biographical datasets to network analysis and statistics, illuminating how elites recruited, reproduced, and governed.