Intervening Opportunities: A Theory Relating Mobility and Distance
The movement of people in space is a basic subject of sociological inquiry.
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The theory here proposed and studied empirically assumes that there is no necessary relationship between mobility and distance. Instead, it introduces the concept of intervening opportunities. It proposes that the number of persons going a given distance is directly proportional to the number of opportunities at that distance and inversely proportional to the number of intervening opportunities. Another way of stating the same hypothesis is that the number of persons going a given distance is directly proportional to the percentage increase in opportunities at that distance.