Chapter 6 Percentage Tables - Polity

that are in poverty. Policy makers would therefore be advised to focus resources on
one‐person households.
6.4 The NCDS teaching dataset NCDS_ExpData_teach.sav contains information on the social
class of cohort members at age 46 and the social class of their father when they were aged
16. Construct both an inflow and an outflow mobility table and discuss the results.
By calculating row percentages (with Father’s social class defining the rows) we get an ‘outflow’
table. This shows, for example that of those boys with a father in social class 1 at age 16, 19%
became professionals by age 46 compared with just 4.4% of boys with a manual father. In
contrast, by calculating the column percentages we create an inflow table and discover that 8.5%
of those who are currently in the professional group at age 46 come from a background with a
manual father in social class IV. Arguably the inflow table, with row percentages, gives a better
indication of the level of social mobility for those boys born in 1958. This is because it can be used
to look at the relative chances of boys with different social class backgrounds reaching the
Professional social class by age 46.