Studying Cross National Mobility Rates.

Recent publication of a seminal paper analyzing variation in upward and downward mobility rates should alert social scientists to the possibilities for quantitative research in this intricate field. Like most trail-blazing papers, the analysis is subject to evaluation and a critical analysis at this point may stimulate further profitable research. The comments on the cover five problems. Although it is said that the upward and downward mobility rates used in the paper now under discussion classify farmers as manual workers, this rule is not easily followed. The top panel groups those nations in which the original data, reported farm sons and fathers separately from urban workers. Four studies did not separate farm from urban workers, but placed farmers in a low prestige category. It was decided to use all available nations by including farmers and grouping them with non farm workers. However it is difficult to use the same data and compute mobility rates identical to those obtained especially broken out in the original data. The efforts to reconstruct the identical data resulted in six different upward and six different downward rates.