Title: The operationalisation of social class
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Introduction to Quantitative Analysis

The operationalisation of social class

As an example, let’s consider a concept that has great significance across social and political science: social class. This is also a concept with which people in general are mostly familiar: e.g. in the UK most people would have an understanding of what is meant by terms such as ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’. But it is also a very complex concept, with many different aspects and meanings: it is what we might call a multidimensional concept. How might we go about transforming this concept in order to make it amenable to quantitative analysis? An essential step is to find appropriate indicators of the concept: i.e. dimensions that have a more measurable quality. For social class, these could include:

1 | We might simply ask people to tell us which class they feel they belong to. This would address the subjective dimension of social class.
2 | We might look at the kind of things that people like to do: e.g. which kind of newspapers, books and websites they read; what kind of music they like; whether and how often they visit the theatre, art galleries, concert halls; what kinds of films and television they like; where and how often they go away on holidays, etc. This would address the cultural dimension of social class
3 | We might investigate people’s material circumstances: how much they earn; what kind of house they live in; what kind of things they do or do not own
4 | Or we might try to define someone’s social class on the basis of how they earn a living, the job they do. We might call this occupational class.

But why would such approaches amount to quantitative analysis when most of these dimensions have no inherent numerical quality? The reason is that we use numbers to represent these things, and this is done in at least two respects:

1) We divide people into categories (e.g. based on whether or not they go to the theatre or own their home) and then use numbers as a kind of shorthand to represent these different categories.

2)  We then count the numbers of people in each category and present these counts as numbers or percentages, which in turn help us begin to address the questions we want to answer in our research.

See the chart example below, each category is represented by a percentage and has been given a numerical value.

Census of England & Wales, 2011
Housing Tenure
Living arrangements | Create Infographics

We can and do collect quantitative data related to all the aspects of social class outlined above. But often we define someone’s class purely on the basis of the work they do to earn a living. However, even this approach is more complex than it might at first seem. We usually go beyond simply asking someone what job they do, and for good reason. E.g. if someone tells us they are an ‘engineer’ that might mean that they are in charge of building bridges or that they fix photocopiers. So as well as their job title we might also ask people whether they are employed or self-employed; what size of organization they work in; whether they employ, manage or supervise any people and if so how many; and whether they require any special qualifications or training to do their job. This suggests that even occupational class is multidimensional.

In fact such questions form the basis for one common contemporary method of operationalising occupational class in the UK: the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification, or NS-SEC for short.