Search

The article discusses that in the early 1950's a research committee within the International Sociological Association (ISA) was formed around the topics of social stratification and mobility. An important impetus to this convocation of international interests was the dearth of empirical studies of occupational mobility in the industrialized and industrializing nations of the world by which to assess sociological speculations regarding the interplay of cultural values, economic development, and changes in institutionalized inequalities and social stratification. Subsequent parametric estimates of mobility in Italy, the United States, and Australia were published by Lopreato (1965), Blau and Duncan (1967) and Broom and Jones (1969) respectively. Now, a second generation of national mobility studies is underway, with some already out of the field and others well under plan. Owing to interim developments within the discipline, these second generation studies promise greater comparability of data and clearer insights into comparative sociological processes than did the first generation.

The impact of changes in age patterns of nuptiality on the net reproduction rate is examined using life table techniques and assuming that age-specific fertility within marriage and fertility outside of marriage are fixed. In the second section, a standardization technique is used to investigate the impact of changes in nuptiality on age-cumulative measures of marital fertility. Examples using data for selected generations of Australian women demonstrate the extent to which recent changes in average completed family size in Australia were affected by changing nuptiality patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]