Abstract
This paper examined characteristic features of several occupational status scales and their peculiar effects on our understanding of intergenerational mobility structure. On the one hand, there are traditional occupational scales such as an occupational prestige scale and a socio-economic index, and on the other hand, there is a type of scale which is derived from mobility table itself by applying ordination methods. This paper considered the sociological and statistical meanings of the latter type of scale and showed its usefulness in describing changeable structure of today’s social mobility. Correspondence analysis, the most popular method for ordination, was applied to the Japanese mobility table with 81×81 matrix. The analysis confirmed the results of the preceding studies, where ordination methods assigned positional scores plausibly to every occupational category and their use in path analysis brought about a very different view of status attainment process from one based on traditional occupational scales.
