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 are known and accepted by everyone. Thus, when in a particular culture somebody is assigned as a ‘mother’, everybody within that culture will immediately attach certain attitudes and expectations of behaviour that define that ‘status-role’, and that need not be specified because they are of general knowledge. Linton differentiated, besides, between ‘ascribed’ and ‘acquired’ status. Ascribed status (as gender or age) is easily recognizable and therefore easily and soon assigned to individuals, so that they can learn quickly the attitudes and behaviours that are expected from a particular status. Acquired status (as occupation) is assigned to individuals only after they have demonstrated certain skills or after they fulfil certain requisites. The conceptual pair ‘status-role’ has been of great importance in sociological theory in order to refer to the structural or dynamic aspects of any social position within a social system (Bendix & Lipset, 1953; Davis & Moor, 1945; [Page 912]Homans, 1953; Hughes, 1945; Hyman, 1942; Tumin, 1953).

The concept of socio-economic status developed later, mainly as a response to the Marxist concept of social class, defined in many varied ways by Marx himself in different writings (Marx, 1849, 1852), though Dahrendorf (1959) synthesized them many years later. Marx's concept of social class was not only very ideological, but also a clear oversimplification of social reality, and in addition, not easily ‘operationalizable’. Those reasons seem to explain why non-Marxist sociologists, and especially North American sociologists, preferred to use less ideological and easy to operationalize concepts, like ‘subjective social class’ (social class with which one identifies oneself), or the many variations of ‘objective social class’, or more specifically, social stratification.

More acceptable to North American sociologists was the concept of social class elaborated by Max Weber (1922), who distinguished between social class based in economic aspects (like Marxism) or social estate (or strata) based on the social prestige of the different status. Similarly, Warner (1941–1959) came to the conclusion, when studying the social stratification systems in American cities based on the social relations of individuals, that there is no single system of stratification that might be universally applicable.

Measurement

Empirical social research during the past fifty years has demonstrated the great difficulties encountered in the operationalization of the Marxist concept of social class (even in agreeing on the abstract meaning of that concept). But there have been many attempts to operationalize the subjective concept of social class self-identification (based on the assessment made by the individual himself) and the more objective concept of socio-economic status (based on the supposedly more objective assessment made by the researcher).

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