Summary
Contents
KEY FEATURES: • Designed to be used in a range of 100-level and 200-level courses, including introductory sociology, social problems, and courses that focus on race, class, gender, or sexuality. • Introduces students to basic analytic techniques in the social sciences, such as frequency distributions, cross-tabulations, and comparisons of means. • No software purchase required–all exercises are carried out on the open-access Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) website. • Screen captures from the SDA website, and careful step-by-step instructions, are provided to help students with no previous data analysis experience. • Early chapters focus on single categories of difference and inequality; later chapters examine how these factors intersect within the domains of family, education, and work. • Multiple choice questions and open-ended exercises at the end of each chapter test mastery of the material and give students opportunities to extend their analyses to other questions.
Analyzing Class with the GSS
Analyzing Class with the GSS
Introduction: Key Concepts in Class
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- Identify GSS variables related to class and socioeconomic status.
- Construct new categories for variables (recoding).
- Conduct comparisons of means for ordinal- and interval-ratio-level variables.
- Conduct bivariate analyses related to class and interpret these within a social justice framework.
Class is one of the key concepts in social science research. In formal terms, class refers to “a grouping of individuals with similar positions and similar political and economic interests within the stratification system.”1 More informally, social class is a shorthand way to describe how the wealth, social status, and political power of an individual, along with that of her or his family, structures ...
