Compare methods

	Surname-Based Mobility Analysis	Historical Social Mobility Tables
Field	Social History	Social History
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2014	1992
Originator	Gregory Clark	Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe; log-linear methods from Leo Goodman
Type	regression-estimation	descriptive-tabular
Seminal source	Clark, G. (2014). The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691162546	Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Clarendon Press. ISBN: 9780198273837
Aliases	Clark surname method, Group surname mobility, Surname-group status persistence, Implied intergenerational elasticity	Origin-destination mobility tables, Intergenerational mobility analysis, Log-linear mobility models, Erikson-Goldthorpe mobility tables
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	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.