The BBC this morning is heavily trailing the forthcoming (academic) publication of the results of a massive survey (161,000 participants) on social class in the UK, carried out through its website in 2011. The questionnaire was devised by the sociologists Fiona Devine (U. Manchester) and Mike Savage (London School of Economics and Political Science); the results will be presented at the British Sociological Association annual conference today, and published in the _Journal of Sociology_ (they're not there yet).
The way the BBC portrays the results, class can now be 'divided up' into seven categories (as opposed to the 'traditional three' of upper, middle and working): the new categories are Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Traditional Working Class, Emergent Service Workers, and Precariat (or Precarious Proletariat). Clearly, they have presented it this way because of the (peculiarly British) obsession with knowing which class you 'are', as if it were immutable. On the websites below, there is also a 'Class Calculator', which asks you certain questions about your economic, social and cultural capital, and then tells you which of the seven categories you fall into. In the calculator, economic capital is assessed by asking about your assets, social capital by asking about the friends you have, and cultural capital by asking how you spend your leisure time. Interestingly, I was asked about my household income but not about what my job was, which is a departure from a (justifiable!) rule of thumb that sociolinguists often have. For me, its conclusion (Traditional Working Class) was not intuitive: interesting, and not completely incredible, though it leads me to think that the website's method leant too heavily on amount of assets. I could be Traditional Working Class but was surprised not to find myself in one of the Middle Class divisions.
Because of the way interactive websites are constructed (you clearly can't see the workings), I don't know how the site uses data in order to arrive at conclusions, so I'll be interested to see the paper when it is published. At the very least, this seven-way categorisation indicates that the methodology used to arrive at it is probably subtle and complex enough for SEC to be treated as a continuous variable, not a discrete one. It would also be interesting if a few non-UK people were to do the online calculation, just for fun, and see how well they think its conclusions apply to them! As a test of the sociologists' methodology and ours, it would also be interesting to see how these seven class categories line up with linguistic data in previous studies that have included class. If this holds up to inspection, there's a lot of interesting new work ahead!
More detail:
Summary article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21970879
More detailed article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22007058
Quite a few more pages on it are also available, if you Google all the following together:
class survey site:bbc.co.uk
In one of the sites, the article opens with a classic sketch about British perceptions of class, 'I Know My Place'. It features John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett (those last two were the 70's-80's pair The Two Ronnies), and is very telling about how class was seen British society at the time. The obsession with class, and how people feel stratified by it and act accordingly, might still hold today, whether or not the categories are different. Here's the whole thing on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mURhNIjc-Kw
Damien
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Damien Hall
Newcastle University (UK)
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