Defining and Measuring Social Class
"Defining and Measuring Social Class" involves categorizing individuals or groups based on their economic, social, and cultural characteristics. This can be done using various indicators such as income, education, occupation, and lifestyle. The measurement of social class helps researchers and policymakers understand social inequalities and their impact on society.
7 Key excerpts on "Defining and Measuring Social Class"
eBook - ePubRich Voter, Poor Voter, Red Voter, Blue Voter
Social Class and Voting Behavior in Contemporary America
- Charles Prysby(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Conceptualizing Social Class Definitions matter. This is particularly true for studying how social class is related to political behavior. Different definitions of social class yield different results. Stories in the popular media most frequently use education as their measure of social class, with those who lack a college degree defined as working class and those with a four-year degree classified as middle class. Political scientists are more likely to use income to measure social class, most commonly dividing voters into two or three income groups. In the past, social scientists frequently used occupation to define social class: blue-collar or manual workers were considered working class; white-collar or non-manual workers were middle class. Each of these measures has its advantages and disadvantages. This chapter examines the relative merits of each of the possible measures of social class and explains why social class is expected to affect political behavior. For reasons that I outline below, this study relies on income as the primary measure of social class, especially for the analysis of the most recent elections, although I bring education and occupation into the analysis as well in order to provide a more complete picture. The discussion in this chapter provides a foundation for the remainder of the book, which analyzes how and why social class has been related to voting behavior and how that relationship has changed in recent years. The basic idea of social class or socio-economic status is that people differ in their social and economic resources, which are important in determining how much control they have over their choices and opportunities in life. Those with greater resources have more ability to choose where they live, where they can send their children to school, what medical care they can receive, and so on...
eBook - ePub- Anthony Giddens, Philip W. Sutton(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Then we will take in some influential theories of class and attempts to measure it before moving on to a more detailed look at social classes and lifestyles in the developed societies. The chapter also covers social mobility – how far up or down the social scale it is possible to move – and how much mobility there is today. Other forms of stratification may be explored in the readings at the end of the chapter. For an extended discussion of schooling and the reproduction of inequalities, see chapter 16, ‘Education’. Systems of stratification The concept of social stratification is used in sociology to describe structured inequalities between social groups within societies. Often we think of stratification in terms of assets or property, but it can be based on other attributes, such as gender, age, religious affiliation or military rank. Individuals and groups enjoy differential (unequal) access to rewards based on their position within the scheme. One way of thinking about this is to see stratification as similar to geological layering of rock in the Earth’s surface. Societies can be seen as consisting of ‘strata’ in a hierarchy, with the more favoured at the top and the less privileged nearer the bottom. All socially stratified systems of this kind share three basic characteristics. The rankings apply to social categories of people who share common characteristics without necessarily interacting or identifying with one another. For example, women may be ranked differently from men or wealthy people differently from the poor. Individuals from a particular category may move between ranks, but the category itself continues to exist. People’s life experiences and opportunities depend on the relative ranking of their social category. Being male or female, black or white, upper class or working class makes a big difference in terms of life chances – often as large as personal effort or good fortune. The ranks of social categories tend to change only slowly...
eBook - ePubSocial Class and Classism in the Helping Professions
Research, Theory, and Practice
- William Ming Liu(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...These individuals may also be in a recurring debt cycle—probably a lifestyle largely leveraged on credit cards and other loans or extended mortgages—so that they may pursue or express a particular lifestyle or material excesses that are valued by the higher-social-class group to which they aspire. For these individuals, current ways of understanding their social class experiences and perceptions do not capture the complexity of how they conceptualize themselves as part of a social class group. Implications for Practice Throughout this chapter I have attempted to identify the shortcomings of current theories, paradigms, and frameworks on measuring social class and classism. Here, I will distill what I have presented into some practical considerations for helping professionals. 1. Helping professionals should identify specific variables of social class and define them in ways that may be observed and measured. Operationalizing these variables and even connecting these variables to a larger coherent theory of social class is important in research. 2. Try to provide some context to the data about to be collected. If income or some other discrete variable is of interest, provide a reference point by which a comparison may be made. For instance, examine demographic or census tract data about income for the specific population or community being measured and present these data. 3. Look for measures or portions of measures that may be used or adapted to assess for social class or classism. Rather than looking only for social class measures, helping professionals may look broadly at other ways social class is conceptualized such as social status, mobility, self-perception, acculturation, identity, or worldview. These measures should reflect some psychological, interpersonal, or intrapsychic experience and not a measure of classification or categorization. 4. Always give some consideration to the role of classism in social class...
eBook - ePub- Kylie A. Peppler(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Despite researchers’ reliance on income, education, and occupational status to measure a family’s socioeconomic status, society’s conception of social class goes beyond economic factors. Consider, for example, the case of a teacher and a plumber. The plumber may have a greater material income than the teacher, but the teacher is likely to have a higher level of education than the plumber. These occupational categories are historically linked to social class, with the teacher likely considered to belong to a higher social class than the plumber, despite potentially having less economic capital. Income, educational status, and occupation also shift over time, complicating how we consider individual social class identifications. Someone whose parents had low levels of education, low-status occupations, and low incomes may go on to get an advanced degree, hold a high-status job, and have a high level of income. On the other hand, a child growing up in a family with highly educated parents may experience a decrease in material resources if a parent loses his or her job. Pierre Bourdieu’s theories have strongly influenced researchers’ and societies’ conceptions and definitions of social class. Bourdieu provided terminology for the different aspects of social class that yield the complex scenarios just noted. Bourdieu defined social class as differential positions within social space that are defined by the volume and composition of the capital that an individual holds. Capital and power are linked, as the distribution of capital within society determines social power. Different social class positions thereby carry differential amounts of social power, constituted by their differential access to capital. Importantly, capital is not limited to economic resources. Capital includes other types of resources associated with factors such as education and occupation, among others...
eBook - ePubMeasures Of Socioeconomic Status
Current Issues
- Mary G Powers(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2. Measurement of Socioeconomic Status from United States Census Data Charles B. Nam, E. Walter Terrie DOI: 10.4324/9780429049170-2 Introduction The origin of the term “socioeconomic status” (SES) is difficult to determine, but social scientists have long used the phrase to denote the relative location of an individual or group within a socially desirable hierarchy. Max Weber identified three distinct but interrelated aspects of the social hierarchy--namely, class, status, and party (Gerth and Mills, 1958). He regarded “party” as the power to influence one’s own affairs and that of others, “status” as the regard with which individuals are held by others, and “class” as the social and economic life chances which people experienced. It is in this latter sense that researchers have looked for measures of socioeconomic status as a basis for indicating social class, and it is this common understanding of the term that led to the definition of “socioeconomic” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1976) as “of, relating to, or involving a combination of social and economic factors; specifically, of or relating to income and social position considered as a single factor.” The inability of social researchers to develop consensus on the real distinctions between class, status, and party, and further difficulty in specifying the nature of the interrelationships and the variables which are determinants of each aspect, has placed measurement of socioeconomic status in an uncertain position...
eBook - ePub- Rosemary Crompton(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Thus throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it has become commonplace for social researchers of all kinds (in academia, government and commercial agencies, and so on) to divide up the occupational structure into aggregates corresponding to different levels of social and material inequalities, which are commonly known as ‘social classes’. Reid (1981: 6), for example, defines a ‘social class [as] a grouping of people into categories on the basis of occupation’, and Parkin has asserted that: ‘The backbone of the class structure, and indeed of the entire reward system of modern Western society, is the occupational order’ (1972: 18). However, despite its acknowledged usefulness as a social indicator, there are a number of difficulties in using occupation as a measure of ‘class’ (Reid 1998: 11–13). Four major areas of difficulty may be identified. First, there is the fact that only a minority of members of contemporary societies will be ‘economically active’, and therefore have or be seeking an occupation, at any time. A variety of strategies are available for allocating the ‘economically inactive’ (children, old people), or those without an occupation, to an occupational class. These include giving all household members the same ‘class’ as that of the ‘head of household’ or ‘main breadwinner’, and locating the retired in the ‘class’ indicated by their last occupation. It has been argued that this strategy has been a reasonably successful one (Marshall et al. 1996)...
eBook - ePubSocial Stratification
Trends and Processes
- Roxanne Connelly, Vernon Gayle, Paul Lambert, Paul Lambert(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Inequalities associated with occupation-based measures are explained according to seemingly vague or inconsistent conceptions of social differences, such as of ‘socio-economic status’, ‘class’ or ‘social advantage’. Despite the admirable work of theorisaton and validity testing of some occupation-based measures, we argue that the latter interpretation is, in most circumstances, preferable. The problem arises because occupation-based measures are inherently inclusive in their empirical properties – they may indeed correlate with things that they are theorised to be related to, as validity studies show, but they may also correlate to many other things which do not play a part in their theorisation (see also Tahlin 2007), including unintended collinearities with social differences of age and gender. Isolating a particular theoretical influence as captured by an occupation-based measure is generally very difficult, requiring a full set of multivariate measures and rich underlying data. Accordingly, in most circumstances, what is being measured by occupation-based social classifications is an amalgamation of properties and differences, not a neatly isolated concept, and it has been a major oversight to claim otherwise. It is not ordinarily the case, therefore, that empirical evidence from occupation-based measures allows us to make statements about the exact processes and mechanisms of social stratification (contra Rose et al. 2010). Conveniently, however, the amalgamation of differences captured by occupation-based measures is reasonably labelled by the concept of ‘social stratification’, because that concept refers to relative position within the socio-economic structure in a generic manner (cf. Bottero 2005). Whilst other labels such as ‘class’ and ‘status’ are tied to more specific theoretical interpretations, the idea of social stratification does not have such problematic connotations...
