The UK Seven Social Classes
Sara Lyall, “Multiplying the Old Divisions of Class in Britain”, New York Times, 3 April 2013 (summarized): Class in Britain used to be a relatively simple matter, or at least it used to be treated that way. It came in three flavors – upper, middle and working – and people supposedly knew by some mysterious native sixth sense exactly where they stood. As the very tall John Cleese declared to the less-tall Ronnie Corbett in the famous 1966 satirical television sketch meant to illustrate class attitudes in Britain – or, possibly, attitudes toward class attitudes – “I look down on him, because I am upper class.”
It is not as easy as all that, obviously. The 2010 election was enlivened at one point by a perfectly serious discussion of whether David Cameron, now the prime minister, counted as upper upper-middle class, or lower upper-middle class. But on Wednesday, along came the BBC, muddying the waters with a whole new set of definitions.
Having commissioned what it called “The Great British Class Survey”, an online questionnaire filled out by more than 161,000 people, the BBC concluded that in today's complicated world, there are now seven different social classes. (“As if three weren't annoying enough,” a woman named Laura Phelps said on Twitter.) These range from the “elite” at the top, distinguished by money, connections and rarefied cultural interests, to the “precariat” at the bottom, characterized by lack of money, lack of connections and unrarefied cultural interests.
That might sound kind of familiar, but Fiona Devine, a sociologist who helped devise the study, said, “It's what's in the middle which is really interesting and exciting.”
The middle categories, as the study defines them, include the “technical middle class,” a group that has a lot of money but few superior social connections or cultural activity; the “emergent service workers,” a young, urban group that has little money but a high amount of social and cultural capital; and the “new affluent workers,” who score high on social and cultural activity, but have only a middling amount of money.
“There's a much more fuzzy area between the traditional working class and the traditional middle class,” Ms. Devine, a professor of sociology at Manchester University, said in remarks accompanying the research. “The survey has really allowed us to drill down and get a much more complete picture of class in modern Britain.”
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The study was published in the journal Sociology and conducted by Ms. Devine in conjunction with Mike Savage, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, and the BBC Lab UK.
Karl M. van Meter, “Structures of Human Societies” (3 June 2013), posted at http://www.academia.edu/3640240/Structures_of_Human_Societies. We have previously shown (“How People See Society: The Network Structure of Public Opinion Concerning Social Conflicts”, Connections, 2004, 26(1): 71-89) that opinions on social conflict are structured in very stable networks at the level of individuals, of arbitrary collections of individuals, of structured social groups and of representative samples of the French population, and this for more than thirty years. Similar surveys in Great Britain and Russia, and for over ten years in Costa Rica, show the stability and extent of application of these results. Our first working hypothesis is that this network structure with two axes – openness / closure and emotional / non-emotional – applies to all human societies. For this, we look at recent developments in archaeology, which describe two and only two types of structure for Neolithic human groups: hierarchical structures and cooperative structures. We show that these two types of structure are the poles delimiting the openness / closure axis, that there are no other stable structures, and that human societies can thus be characterized by the set of “tools” elaborated in common – this is, socially – for managing social conflicts inherent in any viable and stable group of human beings. And finally, these “tools” form the system of “values” characteristic of each society.
Claire Bidart and Patrice Cacciuttolo, “Combining Qualitative, Quantitative and Structural Dimensions in a Longitudinal Perspective. The Case of Network Influence”. Quality and Quantity, 2013 47(5): 2495-515. Young people were interviewed every three years in four survey waves and produced 287 interviews and friendship networks, and 10,804 informed relationships. The influence of the networks upon life orientation comes mainly from strong central ties but also from some peripheral isolated mates. There is a general trend toward dissociation of ties one from the other when people enter adult life, which makes influence from the network become more and more diversified.
André Schultz Christensen and Jacob Ladenburg, “Does Survey Experience Affect Respondents’ Reported Level of Satisfaction?” Quality and Quantity, 2013 47(5): 2659-69. Little research has addressed the challenges of potential effects of respondents' survey experience, known as panel conditioning. A survey was conducted through an online panel and included measurements of past survey participation. The authors found no significant evidence that survey experience affects respondents' reported level of satisfaction and these results persisted when testing the potential interaction between survey experience and experiences with the subject of the survey.
Brady T. West and Frauke Kreuter, “Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Interviewer Observations: Evidence from the National Survey of Family Growth”, Public Opinion Quarterly, 2013 77(2): 522-48. Interviewer observations of household characteristics can be useful variables for constructing post-survey non-response adjustments, particularly if the observations are good proxies of key variables collected later in the survey. The US Census Bureau and other survey data-collection organizations now systematically design interviewer observations with this purpose in mind. However, because these observations are typically estimates or judgments made by the interviewers, they may be incorrect. The effectiveness of non-response adjustments using these observations is hampered by such errors. Thus, knowledge about both household- and interviewer-level factors that affect the accuracy of interviewer observations is important for survey researchers in their efforts to design interviewer observations. To date, only one published study of a face-to-face household survey has attempted to identify these factors. This paper attempts to help fill this gap in knowledge by presenting multilevel models of the accuracy of a housing-unit observation recorded by interviewers in the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG): whether or not young children under the age of 15 are present in the household. The presence of children in the household is an important correlate of key variables in the NSFG and many other socio-economic surveys, and is related to survey participation in general. The accuracy of this observation was found to be a function of selected household-level factors and interactions between household- and interviewer-level factors. Implications of these results for practice and directions for future research are discussed.
Peter Lynn and Olena Kaminska, “The Impact of Mobile Phones on Survey Measurement Error”, Public Opinion Quarterly, 2013, 77 (2): 586-605. We propose a framework of ways in which the different context of mobile interviews – such as multi-tasking, distraction, and the presence of others – and differences inherent in the technology can influence survey responses. The framework also highlights the mechanisms through which these influences operate. We evaluate selected elements of the framework using data from a randomized experiment in which respondents were interviewed by mobile or landline. Measures of interview context were gathered via interviewer evaluation, respondent perception, and direct questioning. We find less social desirability bias with mobile telephone interviews, but overall only small differences between mobile and landline interviews.
