A society is composed of different socio-economic groups. At a given time, individuals in the society can be classified into different such groups. With the change of time, individuals can move across different groups. Social mobility is viewed as an aggregation of such individual movements across different socio-economic groups. We develop a simple analytic framework to discuss the issue of social mobility, and derive a class of measures for social mobility. A prominent member of this class is the Bartholomew measure that has often been used in applied work. We apply our framework and the theoretical results to the Chinese society by investigating its income mobility for the period between 1989 and 2011. We find an increasing trend in income mobility in 1990s and a drop in the middle and the late of 2000s. By decomposing total mobility into subgroups and into movements, we find that the lowest income group and one/two-step moves make the largest contribution in total mobility.
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