The use of marriage data to measure the social order in nineteenth-century Britain
Bottero, Wendy and Prandy, Kenneth (1998) The use of marriage data to measure the social order in nineteenth-century Britain. Sociological Research Online, 3, (1)
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Description/Abstract
This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.
Keywords:
Correspondence Analysis; Marriage; Measurement; Social Mobility; Social Order; Social Reproduction; Social Space
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| ISSNs: | 1360-7804 (print) |
| Related URLs: | |
| Keywords: | correspondence analysis, marriage, measurement, social mobility, social order, social reproduction, social space |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain |
| Divisions: | University Structure - Pre August 2011 > School of Social Sciences > Sociology and Social Policy |
| Item ID: | 33815 |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Dec 2006 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Jun 2011 06:38 |
| Contributors: | Bottero, Wendy (Author) Prandy, Kenneth (Author) |
| Date: | 1998 |
| Status: | Published |
| Contact Email Address: | wendy.bottero@manchester.ac.uk |
| URI: | http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/33815 |
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