Abstract
The differentiation of urban society and rural society is a continuous process, and the relation between town and country is always correlative allowing no absolute severance at all. Standing upon this viewpoint of continuance, some continuous scales are needed in order to take measure of the cifferentiation of urban society and rural society. For such a scale, we adopted the coefficient of evenness led by Lorenz curves. We applied it to the case of Hiroshima Prefecture and achieved the following results.
1. The coefficient of evenness about the total population is less than 0.60 in the districts fronting on the sea, and generally more than that in the districts of inland.
2. The coefficient of evenness about the distribution of the population engaged in the secondary and the third industries indicates the numerical value of 80per cent to that of the total population.
3. The coefficidnt of evenness becomes smaller with the change of the time.
Compared the above results with the qualitative knowledge already acquired through other means, it comes to this conclusion that the coefficient of evenness thus gained is very suitable as a continuous scale to survey the differentiation of urban society and rural society. The coefficient of evenness like this can also be utilized for socio-economic analysis.
