Development of a Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment

The GEODE project is developing user-oriented Grid-based services, accessible via a portal, for social scientists who require and use 'occupational information' within their research. There are many complexities associated with social scientists’ use of data on individual occupations. These arise for example from the availability of numerous alternative occupational classifications, and the use of different occupational definitions across countries. This paper describes how the GEODE project is developing an online service which acts as a facility supporting access to numerous occupational information resources. This is achieved through an integrated Grid service which uses a Globus Toolkit 4 infrastructure and OGSA-DAI (Database Access and Integration) middleware to provide the necessary data indexing and matching services, accessed through a user-oriented front-end portal (using GridSphere). The paper discusses issues in the implementation and organization of these services

The use of marriage data to measure the social order in nineteenth-century Britain

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 Spac

Social interaction distance and stratification

There have been calls from several sources recently for a renewal of class analysis that would encompass social and cultural, as well as economic elements. This paper explores a tradition in stratification that is founded on this idea: relational or social distance approaches to mapping hierarchy and inequality which theorize stratification as a social space. The idea of 'social space' is not treated as a metaphor of hierarchy nor is the nature of the structure determined a priori. Rather, the space is identified by mapping social interactions. Exploring the nature of social space involves mapping the network of social interaction - patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity - which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Differential association has long been seen as the basis of hierarchy, but the usual approach is first to define a structure composed of a set of groups and then to investigate social interaction between them. Social distance approaches reverse this, using patterns of interaction to determine the nature of the structure. Differential association can be seen as a way of defining proximity within a social space, from the distances between social groups, or between social groups and social objects (such as lifestyle items). The paper demonstrates how the very different starting point of social distance approaches also leads to strikingly different theoretical conclusions about the nature of stratification and inequality

An introduction to the simple role of numbers in social science research

This paper arose as part of the work for the ESRC-funded Teaching and Learning Research Programme Research Capacity Building Network (L139251106). Includes bibliographical references. Title from coverAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:6224. 879(53) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Isolated housewives and complex maternal worlds: the significance of social contacts between women with young children in industrial societies.

This article reconsiders the picture of the mother of young children in industrialised societies as the 'isolated housewife', suggesting this notion is by no means straightforward. We suggest there is considerable evidence for the existence of mothers' social contacts and their significance both as 'work' and 'friendship' in industrial societies. A pre-occupation with the notion of the 'isolation' of 'housewives' has led social researchers to neglect sustained examination of the social relationships within which many/most mothers are involved on a day-to-day basis. Complexities of interpretation, for example what 'isolation' can actually mean, need to be drawn out from the existing literature. Evidence presented from two recent ethnographic studies shows patterned opportunities/constraints occurring in relation to mothers' social contacts within localised settings, whether through organised groups or other personal ties. The complex nature of individual women's social contacts is thus brought out. Some key questions are raised for the importance to sociology, anthropology and social policy of these apparently insignificant or invisible women's networks