Educational Development and Mobility: an Analysis of Structural Mobility in Taiwan

　　結構流動的概念一向在社會流動的文獻中佔據著核心的位置，近廿年來曾因參數估計的問題與困難而被質疑，甚至有學者主張放棄此一概念；所幸後續的研究發展出準對稱模型以估計傳統流動表中的結構流動參數，使結構流動的概念仍能維持其重要性，並為社會流動的概念累積了更多研究成果。本文嘗試解決結構流動參數的問題，首先充份討論結構流動與交換流動的概念及學界的研究成果，再以實際的經驗資料對模型的設定進行驗証。由臺灣㆔個時點的資料來看，雖然使用準對稱模型來估計結構流動參數仍是有效的程序，卻不完全適用於經驗流動表；我們以準對稱模型為基礎，引入不對稱的小格參數，取得頗為接近經驗流動表的結果。配合臺灣教育發展階段歷程的文獻考查，分析結果發現結構變遷主導了臺灣地區的教育流動，而純粹交換型的教育流動則近似於一個固定但統計上顯著的對稱分布，顯示結構變遷是促成機會分布改變的最重要機制。
　　Structural mobility is always the key issue in the literature on social mobility. In the past 20 years, doubts were raised about research on structural mobility but these have been relieved due to the progress in statistical methodology. Using data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey in 1984, 1990, and 1994, we investigate the association of educational development and educational mobility in an innovative way. Our results first show that the quasi-symmetry model fits rather poorly to the data. Then, given the operationalization of skew-symmetry parameters (using skew-symmetry models), we find that the flows from elementary school to junior high, and from junior high to senior high, have outpaced the overall structural transformation, in a fashion parallel to the process of educational development.