A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

(1992) - Harry B.G. Ganzeboom, Paul M. De Graaf, Donald J. Treiman

Journal: Social Science Research
Link:: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0049089X9290017B
DOI:: 10.1016/0049-089X(92)90017-B
Links::
Tags:: #paper #SocialClass
Cite Key:: [@Ganzeboom1992]

Abstract

We use an optimal scaling procedure, assigning scores to each of 271 distinct occupation categories in such a way as to maximize the role of occupation as an intervening variable between education and income (in contrast to taking prestige as the criterion for weighting education and income, as in the Duncan scale). We compare the resulting scale to two existing internationally standardized measures of occupational status, Treiman’s international prestige scale (SIOPS) and Goldthorpe’s class categories (EGP), and also with several locally developed SE1 scales. The performance of the new ISEI scale compares favorably with these alternatives, both for the data sets used to construct the scale and for five additional data sets

Notes

"The history of intergenerational stratification research is commonly divided into three generations (Featherman et aI1974); a first (post-war) generation of broad social stratification studies using relatively simple statistical tech­ niques, and in which occupational mobility figured as only one issue among many; a second generation dominated by path models of educational and occupational status attainment; and a third generation dominated by loglinear models of occupational mobility" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:278)

"Unfortunately, we also have to exclude from review the intergenerational transfer of material possessions (other than through occupational inheritance), not because it does not occur but because this topic has scarcely been dealt with in the literature (Cheal 1983)." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:279)

"Although Sorokin's (1959 [1927]) Social Mobility is generally acknowledged as the starting point of (comparative) social stratification and mobility re­ search in modem sociology (Heath 1981), only after the Second World War did systematic national studies begin to appear." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:279)

"Glass (1954) on 1949 data for England and Wales was the impetus for the establishment of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Social Mobility of the International Sociological Association, which since its founding has been a major locus of scientific exchange, data sharing, and international collabora­ tion." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:279)

"The first generation research gained a comparative thrust & & through the work of Lipset Zetterberg (1956), Lipset Bendix (1959), and, in particular, Miller (1960" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:279)

"Although the common framework for the first generation studies included national occupational prestige inquiries as a basis for determining occupation­ al status, in the end most published tables were not based on prestige scale scores." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:280)

"Methodologically, much of the analysis in the first generation involved & little more than the inspection of inflow and outflow percentages (Lip set Zetterberg 1956, Miller 1960). However, some researchers recognized that observed mobility rates are a function of the marginal distributions and therefore cannot be used for comparative analyses." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:280)

"A second important hypothesis was that mobility rates tend to be higher in & industrialized societies than in nonindustrialized societies (Fox Miller 1965, Lenski 1966:410-17)." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:281)

"A third concern of the first generation researchers was the effect of political & structure on the extent of intergenerational mobility. Fox Miller (1965) claimed to find a relation between the degree of political stability and the amount of mobility." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:281)

"The inception of the second generation of social mobility research was 0, prompted by three related innovations connected with the name of D, & Duncan. First, Blau Duncan's (1967) US study (OCO I) set new standards for data collection. An important innovation was the coding of occupations into the categories of the US Census three-digit occupational classification scheme." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:282)

"Second, Duncan (1961) introduced a new scale for occupational status to be used with continuous data analysis techniques, his renowned SEl. It measured the status of each occupational category by the average education and income of incumbents of that occupation, thus tapping the major resources of individuals in the process of stratification" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:282)

"Third, and most important, the introduction of & indirect effects (path) models into sociology (Duncan Hodge 1963, Duncan & 1966b) led to the formulation of the Blau Duncan (1967:Ch. 5) status attainment model, which made it possible to assess the relative importance of education and family background for status attainment." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:282)

"The crucial difference between prestige and socioeconomic status is the position of farmers. Whereas farmers enjoy about average prestige around the world, they tend to be near the bottom of socioeconomic status scales such as Duncan's SEI. Since the sons of farmers who leave farming tend to be concentrated in low status (and low prestige) unskilled or semiskilled jobs, SEI scales show more intergenerational association than do prestige scales." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:283)

"The research questions of this second generation were quite different from those in the first generation. The Blau-Duncan model reformulated the old question of how much intergenerational occupational mobility there is in a country into the new ones of how the (direct) influence of father's occupation occupation3 on son's compares with that of other background factors, es­ pecially education, and how much it is mediated by the status of the son's first job" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:283)

"& The main hypothesis of Blau Duncan was similar to one of the major hypotheses of the first generation: industrialization promotes achievement and reduces ascription (Parsons 1940, Kerr et al·1960, Lenski 1966). However, whereas researchers of the first generation thought that such a shift implied an & increase in the overall rate of intergenerational mobility, Blau Duncan (1967:429) offered a more refined hypothesis: as societies industrialize, the importance of achievement processes, i.e. the influence of respondent's education relative to that of parental characteristics, increases, and the im­ portance of ascriptive processes, i.e. the influence of family background, decreases." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:284)

"An important advance in the second generation, which flowed directly from the introduction of simultaneous structural equations as the modelling tool (Joreskog 1970), was the assessment of and correction for measurement unreliability." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:285)

"Finally, one can categorize the second generation by the issues that were not addressed. One of the most conspicuous of these was how social mobility affects political formations, which had been of interest to the first generation." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:285)

"Less conspicuous, but equally important, was the virtual disappearance of items on life style and other consequences of social status from the data collected in the second generation" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:285)

"However, by the time the data became available for comparative analysis, the new exemplary studies of Hauser (Hauser et al 1975a,b, Hauser & & 1978, Featherman Hauser 1978), and Goldthorpe (Goldthorpe Llewellyn 1977a,b, Goldthorpe et al 1978, Goldthorpe 1987) had prompted a massive shift in the dominant thrust of stratification research. Multivariate linear regression models were replaced by a variety of loglinear models, among" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:286)

"which the levels (or "topological") model introduced by Hauser (1978) is dominant" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:287)

"methodological advantages of loglinear models over con­ tinuous data models such as correlation and regression are believed by their advocates to be twofold. First, loglinear models provide a technically ade­ quate way to distinguish absolute mobility from relative mobility chances (social fluidity). Second, such models make it possible to treat a bivariate association as a multidimensional pattern (Hout 1984) and, in particular, to model the diagonal (which represents class immobility) separately from the off-diagonal cells" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:287)

"Class theorists in the field of social mobility argue that social classes are intrinsically discrete and unordered, and hence that ex­ change relationships between social classes are not properly modelled using "hierarchical" measures and the linear models of the second generation of stratification research. Loglinear levels models make it possible to deal with pairwise and asymmetric exchange relations between social classes, without any assumptions regarding the ordering of the" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:287)

"The unofficial program of the third generation of social mobility research in the late 1970s and the 1980s became more or less institutionalized in the CAS MIN project" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:287)

"The substantive results from the CAS MIN project are several. First, a common system of broad class categories (the EGP categories, after Erikson, & Goldthorpe Portocarero 1979) came into use. These categories have been widely accepted as a standard classification of occupational classes for com­ parative research" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:287)

"Second, the model of class mobility proposed by the CAS MIN researchers has conclusively established the existence of multidimensionality and dis­ continuities in intergenerational occupational mobility patterns." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:287)

"Third, the CAS MIN researchers claim support for a number of specific & substantive conclusions (Erikson Goldthorpe 1985, 1987a,b): (a) In­ heritance effects and sectoral effects are more important than hierarchical effects in explaining relative mobility patterns." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:288)

"(b) Relative intergenerational occupational mobility patterns do not differ much between countries." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:288)

"The third generation of social mobility research has considerably narrowed the scope of the field. Through loglinear modelling we have learned more about what is, in fact, only a bivariate distribution. Earlier multivariate research questions, as well as most of the ancillary research questions of the first and second generations, have been dropped from the agenda of the third generation (" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:289)

"Oddly, predilection though, the third generation, with its for class concepts, n A" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:289)

"290 GANZEBOOM, TREIMAN & ULTEE has ignored even the research problem that gave rise to the class approach, the & question of class mobility and political formation (Kurz MUller 1987)." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:290)

"Finally, the issue of data reliability has simply been forgotten" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:290)

"Moreover, most of their post-hoc & arguments on differences between the CASMIN countries (Erikson Gold­ thorpe 1987b) deal with factors other than economic and industrial develop­ ment: legally institutionalized relationships between education and the labor market (the German Lehrstelle [apprenticeship] system), which are claimed to create a particularly wide gap between manual and nonmanual classes; wel­ fare transfers and low income inequality in Sweden, which are claimed to promote social mobility across the board; and the socialist abolition of proprietorship in Hungary and Poland, which is claimed to have decreased the degree of occupational class inheritance. There seems to be some opportunity for an institutional theory of social mobility, but this literature has not produced a concise or coherent formulation of it." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:290)

Massively important. Especially regarding legalised aprenticeships in the UK (note on p.290)

"Although earlier stratification surveys sometimes included detailed educational and occupational histories, & until the introduction of event history analysis into sociology (Tuma Hannan 1984, Blossfeld et a11989) not many analysts had found a proper way to analyze such data" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:291)

"To date, not many comparative analyses of work histories have appeared; Allmendinger (1989) is a notable exception" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:291)

"Although nothing forbids the inclusion of family background in career analyses (this would amount to a detailed analysis of the point in the respondent's career and the historic time when the influence of fathers occurs), not many articles have reported on this (an & exception is Sorensen Blossfeld 1989)." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:291)

"Never­ theless, several interesting and viable multiple indicator analyses have appeared in the literature, but none of them has inspired much replication. Bielby et al (1977) and Hauser et al (1983) implemented a multiple measure­ ment design using repeated measurements from interviews conducted at different points in time." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:292)

"The obvious next step in intergenerational stratification research is to combine the virtues of the second and third generation of research, estimating relative­ ly complex multivariate models and at the same time adequately treating the discreteness and non-uniformity of the core variables of social stratification" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:293)

"One variety of these models, ordered logit models, has gained prominence as a way of carrying out cohort analyses of a part of the status attainment model-educational attainment." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:293)

"Hout (1988) shows that the influence of father's occupation on respondent's occupation is larger for the less educated, thus providing another hypothesis as to how educational growth can promote increased societal openness" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:293)

"Given the strong concentration on occupational status, stratification research­ ers have found it difficult to deal with women (Acker 1973)." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:293)

"Faced with these problems, many of the major data collection efforts in the first two generations simply excluded women from the sample altogether." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:294)

"Sobel's (1981) "diagonal mobility" models, which provide a means of assessing the relative importance of two identically categorized variables (e.g. father's and son's occupation) on a dependent variable, as well as an estimate of the effect of any combina­ tion of categories." (Ganzeboom et al 1991:295)

"With the ISeO as a framework, several standardized measure­ ment schemes have been developed" (Ganzeboom et al 1991:295)