Social Mobility Among American Men

对两代人社会流动性的研究通常会发现，父母及其成年子女所经历的流动性波动相对较小。相比之下，各国之间在流动性的比率和数量上往往存在巨大差异。对这两种模式的一种可能解释是，流动性与经济发展阶段有关。由于发展水平通常不会在短时间间隔内发生变化，代际之间的流动性往往只经历相对较小的波动。然而，由于各国的经济发展有很大的差异，各国的社会流动性也有很大的差异。当代的调查不能直接检验流动性-发展理论，即使他们询问受访者的回忆，因为他们不能收集足够长的时间内的数据。然而，近年来，社会学家和社会历史学家收集了大量关于19世纪和20世纪初美国社会流动性的数据集。它们涵盖了足够的时间，使研究者能够检查长期趋势。（分类数据中的出生队列范围为1976年至1952年。）该分析涉及将受访者的职业安置重新编码为相同的类别，以便在所有数据集中可以用可比较的职业术语来衡量流动性。除了检验流动性发展理论之外，这些数据集还允许分析这150年间美国流动性的种族和地区差异。

Abstract Studies which examine social mobilility across two generations often find relatively small fluctuations in the amounts of mobility experienced by parents and their grown children. Among nations, by contrast, there are often substantial differences in rates and amounts of mobility. One possible explanation for both of these patterns is that mobility rates are tied to stages of economic development. Because development levels do not ordinarily change during short intervals of time, rates of mobility between generations tend merely to undergo relatively minor fluctuations. However, because there are substantial variations in economic development among nations, cross- national rates of social mobility are also quite variable.. Contemporary surveys can not directly test the mobility- development thesis, even if they ask respondents' recollections, because they can not collect data over a sufficently long period of time. In recent years, however, sociologists and social historians have put together a number of data sets on mobility in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They cover a sufficient period of time to permit the investigator to examine long term trends. (The birth cohorts in the disaggregated data range from l776 to l952.) The analysis involves re-coding the occupational placements of respondents into the same categories so that mobility can be measured in comparable occupational terms in all of the data sets. In addition to examining the mobility-development thesis, the data sets permit analysis of both racial and regional differences in mobility in the United States during this 150 year period.