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Subject:

Re: Socioeconomic Status - nominal or ordinal scale?

From:

"Jones, Paul" <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Jones, Paul

Date:

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 23:47:17 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (188 lines)

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.! 
Woody Allen

Paul Jones
Sheffield Hallam University




From: email list for Radical Statistics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Harry Feldman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 26 November 2012 23:18
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Socioeconomic Status - nominal or ordinal scale?


Hi Larry, 

I think you may have inadvertently neglected to 'reply to all' in your reply.

I don't doubt that your usage of terms like 'conitnuous' and 'ordinal' are technically correct, but I've adopted the terminology statisticians in these parts use.

Just to clarify, I don't think anyone pretends that 'economc wellbeing' is a proxy measure of psychological wellbeing, although it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they correlated pretty closely. What I object to is the explicit assertion that 'Total cash income' measures 'economic wellbeing' itself.

In solidarity,
Harry



On 27/11/12 03:18, the.Duke.of.URL wrote:

Harry,

It seems to me that this document is confounding the issue rather than clarifying it. 

A continuous variable ranges over the members of an interval or ratio data set (along with a few others). The function must map onto the real line. On the other hand, if you classify Age into groups, you create an ordinal classification, which are discrete groups. These do not map onto the real line. The reason that an ordinal classification has been created thereby rather than a nominal one is that the age groups have a distinct order of greater than or less than, depending on which way you traverse the groupings.

Nominal groupings have no order, like religious preference or street names. Just as in the ordinal case, you are either in the category or not, provided that the categories do not overlap. Such a mistake occurs quite often in ordinal orderings of income, for example. Ex: 1-100; 100-200. If your income is exactly 100, you fit two categories at once. Hence, an inadequate classification scheme. There should also be no meaningful gaps. So, for an ordinal income distribution, you should have 1-100.99; 101-200.99. Since a penny is the smallest unit, there are no meaningful gaps in this ordinal classification. I'm sure everyone knows this, but just in case.

I would not use the term 'continuous' in this context as this term has a special meaning in mathematics and statistics. And the reader can thereby become confused. Therefore, if they are using the term 'continuous' in this kind of context, I would consider such a usage inappropriate. I would advise finding another term.

Of course, if they are engaged in the activity that Harry thinks they are, then we are in devious territory. I have the feeling that Harry may well be right. That the agency already has a conclusion that they want to reach and are desperately fudging the data in order to 'justify' the conclusion they want. This procedure and scientific research are not even in the same city let alone not being in the same ball park.

I completely agree with Harry that income is completely inappropriate as a proxy for economic well being. As is GDP. Economists generally think they can get a handle on well-being without talking to psychologists or using their research. The economic research I have seen trying to 'measure' well being or happiness relying on psychological data rely on the wrong kind of psychological research, research which was never designed to answer this question. Of course, some research programs can answer more than one kind of question, but that is not what is happening in economics. Behavioral economics is a scandal. It has about as much to do with behavior as mineralogy has to do with weather.

Larry

------ Original Message ------
From: "Harry Feldman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 26/11/2012 06:38:43
Subject: Re: Socioeconomic Status - nominal or ordinal scale?

Just glancing over the document Naoko linked to, the impression I get is that they are discouraging looking at the classification as what I would call 'continuous' rather than 'categorial', which is what I think Larry meant, although he clearly has a much more sophisticated approach to the matter than mine.

A simple example would be a classification of the variable Age. It is inherently continuous ('ordinal'?), with easily ranked values. But once you group persons into age groups, the groups are categorial - you are either in a category or not.

The classification itself is offensive. For one thing, it uses three separate, incompatible coding systems. It would be preferable to use a hierarchical classification that can be output at each level. For another, it is fundamentally a conflation of Occupation, Status in employment, Labour force status and Size of enterprise. For most analytical purposes, it would be preferable to collect and output those variables separately so they can be crosstabulated.  I have serious problems with the occupation classifications I'm familiar with, largely because they no sooner enunciate the classification criteria they are supposed to be based on than they depart from them. Also, one of the underlying concepts - 'skill level' - is poorly defined and applied. There are also serious problems with Status in employment as I understand it. Self employment is typically defined in terms of the nature of the employment contract, whether explicit or derived from indicators like ownership of tools, etc. What this means is that subcontractors, call centre 'consultants', even fast food workers are often technically self employed.

Most importantly, I can't see what it's good for. As far as I can tell, what it really classifies is some concept of occupational prestige. It probably correlates reasonably well with income, but if income's what you're interested in, why not use that in your analysis? Not, I hasten to add, that income stats are all that good - because of issues concerning imputation of cash values to in kind receipts, treatment of losses and expenses in household businesses, definition of the household, intrahousehold transfers, interhousehold transfers, double counting, treatment of windfalls, home ownership, discounts and rebates, etc., equivalisation factors... Certainly the conceit that income is a suitable proxy measure for 'economic wellbeing' is ill founded.

The bottom line, as I see it, is that national statistical agencies collect, analyse and disseminate statistics that they think are useful to the ruling class. Sometimes you can manipulate their output to support radical social analysis, but that's not what they're there for. Returning to Naoko's original question, some statistical agencies may collect data suitable for deriving a measure of 'access to resources', but it would probably involve tinkering with income and wealth data, bringing in access to credit (if that's part of the concept of interest), etc. And ultimately, it's likely just to be an approximation.

Them's my two bob, anyway.

In solidarity,
Harry



On 26/11/12 05:58, John Veit-Wilson wrote:

Dear Rachel -- yes, yes, but, but ..... these are all possibilities. Of course you are right; I shouldn't for a moment disagree that there are many ways of understanding class. The question is what privileges anyone to adopt one over another? Not only that, but which of them works better for some kinds of explanation than others do? Horses for courses.

The question posed seemed to be about the basis of ranking, and I do admit to believing that societies and their cultures come before being articulated in individual consciousnesses and their epistemologies, philosophies, ideologies and so on, in conflict as well as in conformity. So given the variety of tools we have for understanding, and to try to answer a question about a social phenomenon, class [and its variants] which is socially constructed [on economic power bases if you like], I'd prefer to go to the source of the variety of evaluations. So my preference would be to go to that source to seek working answers to the questions you pose.

There isn't a fulcrum on which to move the world; we are all dependent on our possibly conflicting modes of understanding and explanation. You may prefer to privilege yours; I prefer mine. You'd need to persuade me why and how 'statistics' is a system of social meanings and explanations 'above' any specific society before I'll give up my belief that it's a symbolic mode of representing phenomena which themselves are inevitably and inherently socially constructed and expressed in action as well as words. For some of us there's no end to the argument about privileging some perspectives over others. It goes back to the Greeks and perhaps earlier though not in writing, and we shan't settle it. So perhaps we'd better stop. Of course, if we privilege our own consciouness over other people's then we can be dogmatic and argue with them. That's why I prefer a more collectivist approach.

I've got a notion that many years ago I did see some attempts to use empirical methods to answer some of the questions posed about organising ranking in the UK, comparing 'official' with empirically derived popular rankings; they were not the same. Perhaps another list member can remind me.

John VW.

------------------------------------------------------------
From Professor John Veit-Wilson
Newcastle University GPS -- Sociology
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England.
Telephone: +44[0]191-222 7498
email [log in to unmask]
www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/j.veit-wilson/







From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 25 November 2012 11:48
To: John Veit-Wilson; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Socioeconomic Status - nominal or ordinal scale?


Hi John VW, I guess that I'm with John B on this: 

To argue that social class is what people understand it to be *is* a philosophical (and epistemological) position - it both assumes a constructivist way of understanding society (that it is what we, collectively make it to be) and also an ethnographic or anthropological one - that we can know any society best by investigating the general/popular social understandings of society (including of class) of those living within it. 

Other people may however have other ways of understanding class. For example someone from a Marxist perspective would generally reject the idea that classes are 'ranked' or 'ordered' but suggest instead that classes operate in antagonism to one another - so that classes are constructed on the basis of socio-economic contradictions (typically that between capital and labour, but potentially others, within the capitalist or working classes as well), and that this is the case, whether or not this is how class is popularly ranked or understood (or whether it is dismissed as an 'old fashioned' concept). 

Additionally, and getting back to some points made by others, even if you did do 'social behavioural and attitudinal research' you would be left with questions about priority - so for example in determining a 'rank' should we focus predominantly on the cultural aspects of class (who goes to the Opera; who participates in other high-culture circles; who is excluded); economic aspects (income, property or some other measure); self-identity (who identifies as upper/lower/working class); other-identification (occupational prestige, professional status, qualifications); structural relations (self-employed, vs employee, share-holder vs non-share-holder). Answering these questions requires that you, the researcher, has a theory of what matters. If you choose to answer that what matters is what 'society' (however understood) thinks matters, this is still a philosophical and theoretical position, not a self-evident empirical truth.

So while we can't ignore statistics, we also should not assume that they can answer questions (including questions about class) without us setting the parameters for those questions. 

Best, Rachel.  




From: email list for Radical Statistics [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Veit-Wilson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 25 November 2012 11:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Socioeconomic Status - nominal or ordinal scale?


How odd! Since social class is precisely that, a phenomenon found when a society's people categorise, rank and label groups in their society, the first place to look for an answer to this question is not in the epiphenomena of philosophy or ideology [or the politics of how to implement it] but in social enquiry into how that particular society conceptualises and categorises what it calls social classes. 

And if you then want to understand how that society orders and ranks the categories, you have to do some social behavioural and attitudinal research. That's sociology, which stats helps to make more rigorous and reliable. 

So it's not a normative 'decision' how to rank, but a discovery which isn't value-free but is *empirical*. It's not my view, your view or any individual's view what social class is -- it is what we can discover society tells us it is, even if we think society is misguided [as we often do: that's the role of our values, ideology, philosophy, politics etc].

John VW.

------------------------------------------------------------
From Professor John Veit-Wilson
Newcastle University GPS -- Sociology
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England.
Telephone: +44[0]191-222 7498
email [log in to unmask]
www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/j.veit-wilson/


-----Original Message-----
From: email list for Radical Statistics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hennig, Christian
Sent: 24 November 2012 17:45
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Socioeconomic Status - nominal or ordinal scale?

Dear John,

> On the contrary, the decision as to whether class is ordinal,
categorical
> or A.N.Other also depends on your view of what social class is all 
> about i.e. it is a philosophical/political decision as much as as 
> statistical
one
> IMHO


I didn't mean to say the opposite. Of course it is a philosophical/political decision, which, if you want to connect this with data, can be "translated" into statistical formalism by choice of variables, constraints etc.

Best regards,
Christian



*** --- ***
Christian Hennig
University College London, Department of Statistical Science Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, phone +44 207 679 1698 [log in to unmask], www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakche

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