Measuring Aspects of Mobility, Polarization and Convergence in the Absence of Cardinality: Indices Based Upon Transitional Typology

Gordon Anderson ()
Additional contact information
Gordon Anderson: University of Toronto

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2018, vol. 139, issue 3, No 3, 887-907

Abstract: Abstract Social Mobility, Equality of Opportunity, Polarization, Convergence and Segmentation can each be construed as describing a particular transitional process between departure and arrival state population distributions. Frequently indices of their extent are based upon variables that have cardinal measure, however often the terms apply to groupings that are ordinal or categorical, devoid of meaningful cardinal distance, relating to transitions between non-comparable states (as with generational transitions from parental socio-economic class to a child’s educational or health status). In such contexts measurement must rely upon the anatomy of the transition process without dependence on cardinal measure. Accordingly, here indices and tests, applicable in both cardinal and ordinal environments, based upon the structure of an underlying transition process are proposed and implemented. The tools have diverse application, in illustration 3 examples from Canadian Generational relationships, the world size distribution of Gross National Product per capita and Chinese Social to Educational Class Structures are employed revealing many interesting features of transitional behaviors.

Keywords: Social mobility; Polarization; Convergence; Transition matrices; Measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-017-1767-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:139:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11205-017-1767-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-017-1767-1

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().