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Unit VIII Social Institutions
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Instructor's Manual
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IM for Teaching How Occupational Prestige is Measured
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Theme
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DescriptionReplicates in class a portion of the NORC occupational prestige rankings and then discuss both the fact of replication and the consequences of the ubiquitous ranking system.
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Learning GoalsTo provide empirical grounding for students’ intuitive understanding of occupational prestige rankings, and for discussions of stratification theory and social measurement.Back to top
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Procedures
Early in the stratification unit, without prior discussion of occupational prestige rankings, I distribute to each member of the class the attached survey form. After students have completed the forms and returned them, I ask for two volunteers who together will do the necessary tabulations and give them to me at least two hours prior to the next class. (Accuracy is higher with two people working together; two hours lead time allows me to look over the results, spot-check for accuracy, and duplicate results for handouts, and also to make a transparency). These two students have to be instructed carefully to multiply all the 1 ratings by 100, all the 2’s by 80, all the 3’s by 60, all the 4’s by 40 and all the 5’s by 20 (omitting 6’s), add the products and divide by the number doing the ranking, for each occupation. (Last semester’s tabulation sheet, or one that you make up as a sample, is a great instructional aid for your two volunteers.) I use the remainder of the class hour to discuss prestige rankings and status hierarchies more generally.
In preparation for the second project day I revise the previous semester’s handout to include this class’s results: I then have a duplicated page and/or transparency with the 1947 and 1963 NORC ratings and ranks for these eleven occupations (in Bendix and Lipset). I simply rank them 1 through 11, ignoring the relation to other occupations that I have not used, plus class rankings of the eleven in previous semesters, plus the ratings and ranks for the eleven occupations by this class. Sometimes, I get fancy and do a bar chart to show clustering among occupation ranks, but usually I do not have time.
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More InformationI have used this project with classes from 40 to 120 students; if classes are smaller, I suggest surveying several classes to provide reliable ratings.Back to top
References: Reinhard Bendix and S.M. Lipset. 1966. Class, Status, and Power. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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Creator/SourceAdapted from Edgar W. Mills, Division of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at San Antonio, TX. Published in Kain and Neas. 1993, pp. 109-110.
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Other Comments (Interpretation, possible pitfalls)
Americans (and others) are not only allocated to various levels of a stratified occupational system but have also been socialized to accept that system as “right” and their own place in it as “deserved.” The conflicts of interest between different levels and the injustice that prevails in the various mechanisms for sorting individuals into levels are also sensed by many people. The class data allow these ideas to be discussed concretely.
Possible Pitfalls: The only problem with this approach is that it is a hard act to follow, and if you do not produce similarly stimulating activities for succeeding units of the course, the relative deprivation effect upon the class can make them restive and dissatisfied. Consider doing the stratification unit late in the course unless you maintain the pace of student involvement and empirical grouping.
In class I make three uses of the data. First, I return to the survey procedures and discuss measurement, having handed back the forms they filled out previously (it doesn’t matter who gets whose, and I never ask for names on them). Since I also discuss Hollingshead’s classification procedure in Elmtown’s Youth, this makes a useful comparison and gives insight into such measurement issues as use of an expert panel vs. a representative sample, ordinality vs. interval scaling, and the tapping of subjective judgments to indicate unmeasured social structure. Although I usually don’t, the instructor can also raise the question of nomothetic surveys with uniform stimuli vs. idiographic data in which a given stimulus (the occupation rating task) may have different meanings according to the social circumstances (class, sex, ethnic background, occupation) of the respondent. Statistical issues such as variation around the mean and the differing measures of central tendency may be introduced if you are methodology-oriented.
Second, since the student rankings almost always approximate very closely the NORC and previous student rankings, I discuss with them the significance of this remarkable similarity. How is it possible that nonrandom groups of people, highly stratified by age, region, urban setting, and educational level, will repeatedly duplicate the occupational prestige structure obtained from national samples (more or less random) taken 20 and 36 years previously, not to mention the various replications in other nations and cultures? It makes a fine entre to consideration of links between allocation and socialization mechanisms in the society, and especially to reflecting upon the agents most responsible for those links: family, education, the economy, and government. One can also return in later discussions of theories of stratification to the question of false and true consciousness and the future of both conflict and functional interpretation of occupational prestige.
Third, the obvious implications of the results for the nature of the occupational system in industrialized societies can be drawn out in as much length as you have time for. The ratings tend to cluster, with three or four very high ratings, some in the middle, and the isolated low level ones at the bottom. Sociologists usually are grouped with policemen and electricians, a fact which occasions some merriment and provokes a discussion about little-known occupations are hard to rate—and thus about reliability of ratings. (The 1947-1963 change in NORC ratings of nuclear scientists is another example).
Prestige contrasts between occupational groups lead to discussion of the sources of prestige, in the character of the work itself, in historical origins, and in various reputational factors. Changes in the occupation system arising from industrialization and technological innovation can be introduced at this point, along with issues regarding structural and circulation mobility and the “inheritance” of occupational level. The list of ideas for which this project provides empirical grounding is almost endless.