Measurement of Occupational Status in Comparative Analysis

With the increasing use of sophisticated measurement techniques in status attainment research, more attention has been given to the effects of operational definitions on substantive interpretation. This paper reports the results of recoding and recalibrating 1965 Australian mobility data. It is shown that coding unreliability has negligible impact on estimated correlations between father's, first, and current jobs, but that different coding rules and different metrics may affect substantive results. A revised comparison of the process of status attainment in Australia and the United States confirms the artifactual nature of some differences found in an earlier comparison and shows that a new Australian status scale gives equivalent results to Duncan's SEI. The farm sector aside, the process of status attainment in Australia and the United States is basically the same, and the effective equivalence of ANU II and Duncan's SEI scale means that future comparisons of status attainment (at least in the nonfarm sector) can be made without recourse to extensive data recalibration.