Today's _New York Times_ contains a piece about this survey:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/world/europe/multiplying-the-old-divisions-of-class-in-britain.html
It tries to do a little interpretation of the survey for Americans, and contains quite a few British reactions to it, from both academics and the _Daily Mail_. The _Daily Mail_ has a reputation as the newspaper of choice of conservative (and Conservative) people, and accordingly some of the reactions that the _NYT_ quotes from readers of that paper show extreme consciousness of the British class system and of their own (highly-placed) place in it. It would be good to get a more balanced sample of opinion.
Interestingly, the _NYT_ also gives a link to the online version of the _Journal of Sociology_ paper about this survey. When I posted about it yesterday, the paper hadn't yet been published, so it must have come online in the hours after that post. The link is to the website of the publisher of the journal, so I suppose it will work for anyone who can log in through a university library. I haven't read the paper yet - anyone who does read it and has comments about the survey (given what was said yesterday about how we needed to know more about the methods) is welcome to post them here!
Also interestingly, today's _NYT_ article about the UK class survey doesn't refer to the _NYT_'s own 'online class calculator' from 2005, which is good, and very different to the BBC one (though of course many of the data will have changed by now):
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html
Thanks to Lauren Hall-Lew for the 2005 class indicator, and to Malcah Yaeger-Dror for today's _NYT_ article.
Damien
--
Damien Hall
Newcastle University (UK)
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