A SYSTEM OF SOCIAL MATRICES

Richard Stone

Review of Income and Wealth, 1973, vol. 19, issue 2, 143-166

Abstract: The paper is concerned with a method of organizing and analyzing information relating to human stocks and flows. The kind of statistical reporting system envisaged is of a traditional kind, but extended so as to record year‐to‐year changes of state. Life is divided into a number of sequences, each with its own set of characteristic classifications, to avoid an excessive proliferation of categories and so enable many analyses to be made with the kind of statistics already avilable in a number of countries. The need, for some analytical purposes, to combine classifications from different sequences is fully recognized; and this need indicates a direction in which statistical reporting systems should move in the future. The main analytical tool is a set of linear difference equations which, under suitable conditions, can be interpreted either in terms of an input‐output system, as in economics, or in terms of an absorbing Markov chain, as in probability theory. A simple regression model is used to link characteristic classifications. About half the paper is taken up with numerical examples, mainly connected with the British educational system as it was in the mid‐1960's. An application is also given to movements into, through and out of a psychiatric service system in Scotland.

Date: 1973
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