Socio-Demographic Conditions

Introduction

The need for socio-demographic assessment derives from the fact that, in analysing the findings of social research, whether attitudes or behaviours, certain socio-demographic and socio-economic variables seem to have some explanatory power. Gender, age, occupation, family and/or household structure, education, income, rural-urban residence, and many other such variables, have shown to have a great importance because attitudes and behaviours generally vary according to the different categories in which groups of individuals tend to fall.

In this respect, it may be pertinent to recall that the concept of social status acquired a very concrete meaning in the social sciences after Ralph Linton defined it (Linton, 1936) as the position of an individual within a social system, to which society assigns certain attitudes and expectations of behaviour that ...