The mobility table

The core of mobility analysis has been the ‘mobility table’: a cross-tabulation of origins and destinations. Conventionally, origins are shown in the rows across the table and destinations down the columns, with the row and column totals on the right and bottom margins of the table respectively. These totals are often referred to as ‘the marginals’ or the ‘marginal distributions’.

The categories of origins and destinations are ranked from highest to lowest on their social advantages and entered into the table, starting at the top left-hand corner. An example is given in Table A.1, which for simplicity shows three social classes.

Table A.1 contains the data from Table 9.1 for seven NS-SeC classes of men (to simplify the example), regrouped into three classes, for example this creates a new class ‘Class 1& 2’ from SeC Class 1 and SeC Class 2. The logic of a 3 × 3 mobility table with nine cells applies to any table with a higher number of categories. Because of the ordering of the categories, the cells that form a diagonal from the top left to the bottom right of the table contain those who are immobile or ‘self-recruited’. The cells below and to the left of this ‘main diagonal’ show upward mobility, while those above and to the right show downward mobility. Thus in Table A.1, adding the numbers in the cells in each of these zones shows that 43.1% (3,081 + 2,190 + 1,642) are immobile, 38.1% (2,702 + 1,688 + 1,724) are upwardly mobile and 18.8% (1,156 + 578 + 1,277) are downwardly mobile. These figures are calculated by adding together the relevant cells and expressing them as a percentage of the overall total of 16,038. Had we used more categories (as in Table 9.1), the mobility rates would have been higher.

Mobility can also be calculated as movements out of origins or inflow into destinations. Here, the outflow from Class 6 & 7 is (1,688 + 1,724) ÷ 5,054, or 67.5%. The inflow to Class 1 & 2 is 58.8% ((2,702 + 1,688) ÷ 7,471). Outflow mobility is more often used when researchers are most concerned with unfairness in chances of mobility. Inflow mobility is mainly used in discussions of the consequences of mobility for new social formations.