Three-generation analysis of occupational mobility provides an insight into class transmission from grandparent to child to grandchild. The grandparent generation in this paper is a population of immigrants to South Australia, born between the years 1782 and 1821 and who arrived in the colony in 1836. Large scale indexing and ...
(Show more)Three-generation analysis of occupational mobility provides an insight into class transmission from grandparent to child to grandchild. The grandparent generation in this paper is a population of immigrants to South Australia, born between the years 1782 and 1821 and who arrived in the colony in 1836. Large scale indexing and digitisation of vital records have created online resources that enable multigenerational historical studies of social mobility, and this paper uses birth, death and marriage records, combined with obituaries and electoral rolls, to link people across generations.
For the first and second generation, at least three occupations have been gathered, whenever possible, representing the early, mid- and end-career of individuals. This enables intragenerational career mobility analysis for the first and second generations. In the third generation, at least one occupation has been found for each person, with a preference for mid-career occupations. All occupations have been coded using HISCO classification and families allocated to a social class in the HISCLASS scheme of social stratification.
Family class has been ascribed using the occupation of the marriage partner who attracts the higher class position, as assigned by HISCO/HISCLASS coding. By the third generation, women’s occupations are more visible through birth, death and marriage records and the coding of these occupations can result in the family class position following that of the female ‘breadwinner’. In the first and second generation, women are on occasion visible carrying the economic responsibility for the household, and this paper will highlight the rate in which this situation increases into the third generation.
As immigrants, the first generation, or grandparents, of this social mobility study were all geographically mobile, and this paper will demonstrate how a tendency toward geographic mobility continued into the third generation. Upon arrival in South Australia, immigrants were nominally ‘colonists’ or ‘labourers’. This paper will highlight the correlation between geographic movement and the resulting social mobility experience by these ‘colonists’ or ‘labourers’ who took advantage of perceived opportunities in the antipodes.
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