Compare methods

	Quantitative Prosopography	Historical Social Mobility Tables
Field	Social History	Social History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1971	1992
Originator	Lawrence Stone (programmatic statement); roots in Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme	Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe; log-linear methods from Leo Goodman
Type	network-tabular	descriptive-tabular
Seminal source	Abramitzky, R., Boustan, L., Eriksson, K., Feigenbaum, J., & Perez, S. (2021). Automated Linking of Historical Data. Journal of Economic Literature, 59(3), 865-918.	Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Clarendon Press. ISBN: 9780198273837
Aliases	Collective biography, Prosopographical network analysis, Large-scale biographical databases, Career-sequence prosopography	Origin-destination mobility tables, Intergenerational mobility analysis, Log-linear mobility models, Erikson-Goldthorpe mobility tables
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Historical social mobility tables measure how much a person's social position depended on the position of their parents in past societies. The core device is the mobility table: a cross-tabulation of origin class (typically the father's) against destination class (the child's), built from linked parent-child pairs drawn from marriage registers, censuses, or genealogies. Following the framework Erikson and Goldthorpe codified for modern sociology and that historians adapted using HISCLASS, the table is analysed not by raw movement, which is dominated by changes in the class structure itself, but by odds ratios and log-linear models that isolate relative mobility, the strength of association between origins and destinations net of structural change. This distinction between absolute and relative mobility lets historians ask whether genuine fluidity, equality of opportunity, rose or fell across industrialization, migration, and demographic transition, independent of how the shape of the class structure shifted.