The area termed ‘Swansea’ has changed twice since the original 1960 survey. At that time, Swansea was a county borough whose area comprised its urban core and environs. The 1974 Local Government Act expanded it to include the rural Gower Peninsula. Since then Swansea has become a city, and it was again expanded in 1997, when it became a county with the inclusion of the township of Pontardulais and its rural hinterland. The present local authority area therefore includes, as its current name (‘City and County’) suggests, an urban central place together with its hinterland. The expansion of the local authority area since 1960 reflects the increased interconnectedness of the original Swansea settlement with the surrounding area, which together have long constituted the node of the local labour market. The sequence of areas therefore reflects the changing economic conditions of action for the inhabitants of that part of those areas which corresponds to the area of the County Borough of Swansea in 1960 and who constitute the survey population for the purposes of the present study. At various points in the text of this book we refer to data on economic variables for each of these three areas.

The case of Registrar General's Social Class (RGSC) differs somewhat from the other economic variables since we are considering occupations as attributes of individuals rather than distributions of occupations as attributes of collectivities. We were committed to using RGSC because it was used by the original 1960 study and, given that, it was ideally desirable to compare the distribution of our respondents over RGSC categories with recent census data. There were a number of difficulties with this, chief of which were that the 1961 Census only provided social class data for males, current census data was not available for the 1960s Swansea area and the 2001 Census had abandoned the RGSC classification. However, Swansea City and County had published 1991 Census data down to ward level and this was used to construct the 1991 RGSC parameters of the population of the 1960 area.