Interregion-Occupational Persistence and Dispersion: A Model of Geographic and Occupational Mobility

This paper represents the first attempt to develop a set of loglinear models that synthesize gravity models of interregional mobility and loglinear models of occupational mobility. The development of the model is progressed from a simple two-way mobility table analysis to a three-way analysis that controls for one aspect of mobility while investigating another and eventually to a four-way analysis that simultaneously assesses the joint effect of occupational and geographic mobility. An example based on data from the 1970 United States census demonstrates that the models can effectively capture the joint effect of occupational and geographic mobility. The results show that as far as interregional migration is concerned, people were not necessarily more likely to have occupational persistence. Interregional migration was positively associated with both upward and downward occupational mobility, and the propensity for upward mobility was slightly greater than that for downward mobility. Females were likely to be disadvantaged when they remained in their regions. When females moved to other regions, however, their chances of upward mobility were about the same as those of males. Note: Occupation can be ranked according to its prestige or income potential. Movements across occupation ranks over different generations (e.g., father and son) are called intergenerational social/occupational mobility, while movements over a period of time are called intragenerational social/occupational mobility, which is the focus of the current paper. Acknowledgements: We benefited from a discussion with Phil Rees on an early version of this paper presented at the first International Population Geography meeting at St. Andrew, July, 2002. We would also like to thank Samia Islam for her helpful comments.