Historical Social Mobility Tables
Also known as: Origin-destination mobility tables, Intergenerational mobility analysis, Log-linear mobility models, Erikson-Goldthorpe mobility tables
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.
Key highlights
- Cleanly separates structural from relative (exchange) mobility
- Odds ratios are insensitive to changing class sizes, enabling fair comparison
- Log-linear models support formal tests of changing fluidity over time
- Builds directly on standardized HISCLASS origin and destination codes
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use mobility tables when you have linked origin-destination class pairs and want to measure social fluidity in a historical population, especially to ask whether opportunity rose or fell across industrialization, migration, or reform. The log-linear apparatus is essential whenever you need to separate genuine changes in openness from changes in the class structure itself, and whenever comparing mobility across societies or periods with different class distributions. It requires reasonably large samples for stable odds-ratio and log-linear estimation. Prefer surname methods when individual linkage is impossible but group representation is observable, and prefer raw rates only for description, not for claims about underlying equality of opportunity.
Strengths & limitations
- Cleanly separates structural from relative (exchange) mobility
- Odds ratios are insensitive to changing class sizes, enabling fair comparison
- Log-linear models support formal tests of changing fluidity over time
- Builds directly on standardized HISCLASS origin and destination codes
- Requires linked parent-child pairs, which are hard to construct historically
- Marriage-register samples over-represent grooms and under-represent women
- Small samples yield sparse tables and unstable log-linear estimates
- Captures only a single origin-destination snapshot, not lifetime trajectories
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What is the difference between absolute and relative mobility?
Absolute mobility is the raw share of people who end up in a different class from their origin, heavily driven by changes in the class structure, the creation or destruction of positions. Relative mobility measures the strength of association between origins and destinations net of those structural changes, captured by odds ratios. A society can show high absolute mobility while relative chances remain rigidly unequal, so the two must be distinguished.
Why use log-linear models instead of simple percentages?
Percentages, outflow and inflow rates, conflate the effect of changing class sizes with the underlying openness of society. Log-linear models decompose the table into origin and destination margins plus an association term, isolating relative mobility and allowing formal tests of whether fluidity changed across cohorts or differed between societies. They make comparisons fair when the compared populations have different class distributions.
How do historians get origin-destination pairs?
The classic source is the marriage register, which records both the groom's occupation and his father's, yielding an origin-destination pair at marriage. Alternatively, record linkage joins children to parents across successive censuses or in genealogies. Each method has biases, marriage registers favour grooms and miss women, linkage misses the most mobile, so the construction of pairs is itself a careful, error-prone stage of the analysis.
Sources
- 1.Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Clarendon Press.ISBN 9780198273837
- 2.van Leeuwen, M. H. D., & Maas, I. (2011). HISCLASS: A Historical International Social Class Scheme. Leuven University Press.ISBN 9789058678577
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Historical Social Mobility Tables. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/social-history/historical-social-mobility-tables