Page 25 - The Importance of Common Metrics for Advacing Social Science Theory and Research

The Importance of Common Metrics for Advancing Social Science Theory and Research: A Workshop Summary
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13034.html

MEASUREMENT IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 13

in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. They found that if used in occupa-
tional classification to explain health differentials, the Edwards scale was
really the best choice, yet a simple classification of educational attainment
actually dominated any of the occupational components.
Hauser closed this discussion by raising the broader problem with the
use of any of the standard measures of “social class”: the belief that these,
or closely related measures of social standing, taken alone, fully represent
the social and economic standing of a person, household, or family. In his
view, this simplistic view fails to recognize the complexity of contempo-
rary systems of social stratification, in which inequalities are created and
maintained in a substantially but by no means highly correlated mix of
psychological, educational, occupational, and economic dimensions. He
stated that this, more than the details of class measurement, is the greatest
disadvantage of standardization in the measurement of social class.
Occupational prestige, based on lay or expert reports of the “general
social standing” of occupations, was found in the mid-1950s to correlate
highly across national populations, later across time, and between blacks
and whites. Research by Donald Treiman (1976) produced the Standard
International Occupational Prestige Scale. Hauser surmised that this scale
did not take hold in part because sociologists around the world were more
interested in the peculiarities of social mobility in their own nations and
less concerned about comparability, as well as the fact that empirical re-
search showed that prestige was not the main dimension of occupational
persistence.
Studies of occupational prestige in the United States beginning as early
as 1947 covered only modest numbers of occupational titles. In the absence
of a complete set of prestige scores, Duncan created a proxy measure, the
4
Socioeconomic Index for All Occupations (SEI), which has been widely
used in U.S. studies of occupational mobility, including intergenerational
mobility. Hauser emphasized that the SEI represents occupational standing
alone, not individual or family socioeconomic status. This measure and
its competitors (e.g., the Hollingshead Index of Social Position, the Nam-
5
Powers Index) all have limitations. For example, all of these indexes are

based on male workers alone, so they are not valid in today’s market, in
4 This was done by regressing a prestige measure for 45 occupational titles in the 1947
North-Hatt Study on age-standardized educational attainment and income of occupations held
by men in the 1950 census. Duncan (1961) then used the regression weights from the matched
set of occupation titles to produce scale values for all occupations.
5 The Hollingshead Index of Social Position is a multidimensional scale that takes into ac-
count residence, occupation, and education. According to Hauser, it has been widely used in
epidemiological research despite its extraordinarily weak empirical basis. The Nam-Powers
Index is a purely relational index and a more credible competitor to the Duncan SEI, according
to Hauser. It is an average of percentile standing in census income and education distributions.

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