Prestige or Socioeconomic Scales in the Study of Occupational Achievement?

Abstract

Current research on status attainment usually employs either a scale of prestige or of socioeconomic status to rank order occupation titles. Consistently, in the United States (and in limited international comparisons), correlations among variables in basic stratification models which rest upon data in the metric of socioeconomic status are higher than those reflecting occupational prestige. Earlier work advanced a substantive argument for this outcome to the effect that occupational stratification is fundamentally socioeconomic and not prestige mobility. Here we underscore the substantive argument by ruling out two artifactual explanations for these higher correlations. Neither the differential metric properties of the two scales (e.g., the longer "tails" of the Duncan Socioeconomic Index than the NORC prestige scale) nor the component properties of the Duncan scale account for these correlational differences.