Occupational Prestige - History

History

People rate the ‘general standing’ of an occupation (the most common question), which is taken to be a measure of occupational prestige and hence of the social status of occupations. Many other criteria have been proposed, including ‘social usefulness’ as well as ‘prestige’ and ‘status’ themselves. In order to obtain the scale of occupations (which is invariably taken to be national in application), respondents' ratings are aggregated, typically by taking either the average or, as in the classic American study by C. C. North and P. K. Hatt in 1947 (‘Jobs and Occupations) Job prestige did not become a fully developed concept until 1947 when the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), under the leadership of Cecil C. North, conducted a survey which held questions regarding age, education, and income in regard to the prestige of certain jobs. This was the first time job prestige had ever been researched, measured, and taught. Duncan's Socioeconomic Index (DSI) became one of the most important outcomes of this survey, as it gave various occupational categories different scores based on the surveys results as well as the result of the 1950 Census of Population. During the 1960s the NORC did a second generation of surveys which became the basis for the socioeconomic status score until the 1980s as well as the foundation for Trieman's International Prestige Scale in 1977. Out of these surveys and research job prestige has been defined in various ways. Some definitions include:

• The consensual nature of rating a job based on the collective belief of its worthiness.
• Prestige is the measurement of the "desirability" of an occupation in terms of socioeconomic rewards.
• Prestige reflects factual, scientific knowledge about the material rewards attached to certain occupations.

Different people seem to weight these issues differently in their understanding of prestige. Most people seem to implicitly view prestige as a weighted average of income and education and this is the operational definition used in indices like DSI and ISEI. However other people (especially in the working class) seem to have more moralized notions of how much a job helps society and would, for instance, rate doctors high and lawyers low even though both jobs require postgraduate degrees and earn high incomes.

The indicators most commonly used to measure SES come from Duncan's (1961) Socioeconomic Index (SEI), a composite of occupational prestige, income, and education. Duncan used data from North and Hart's study of 1949 occupational prestige and census data to conduct the first correlational study of the statistical relationship between education, income, and occupation. Duncan focused on White males with at least a high school education and income of $3,500 dollars or more in 1949, and found correlations among income, public-ranking of occupational prestige, and educational level of around 0.75. The study did not report whether the index included a sample of ethnic minorities ).

The SEI model continues to influence the way researchers measure SES. The National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS:88, NCES, 1988) initially employed a measure of SES developed by Stevens and Featherman (1981) based on father's income, mother's income, father's education, mother's education, and father's and mother's occupation as rated by the SEI model. In the first-year follow-up study, the National Center for Education Statistics (1990) used the Nakao and Treas (1994) revised SEI model.