The Great British Class Survey

From Thinking Allowed



The British responded massively to the Great British Class Survey. This survey was a source of commotion on television, newspapers, Facebook and Twitter. The study identified 7 social classes, from elite to precariat with various shades in between.
The survey was done through an internet questionnaire in which 160,000 people participated. Critics of the survey responded by saying that the sort of people who respond to internet surveys is different to the general population, more like the Radio 4 crowd, who generally have more refined interests.
To counteract this discrepancy 1000 more people were interviewed face to face, a group which was more representative of the bulk of the population. Most of the conclusions of the survey are based on this group rather than on the larger group.
The point was to explain the differences between people and this survey moves away from classifying defining class in terms of occupation and identifies class by cultural factors.
Whether the conclusions reached by the Great British Class Survey are substantial enough to be taken seriously remains debatable.

Opinion:

The Great British Class Survey seems to not quite have brought clarity to the issue of class difference. It seems like the methods used were less than appropriate in getting an accurate picture of the class distinctions in Britain in this day and age, where there seem to be a wide range of gray zones when it comes to classifying people. It is possible that due to the general access to the internet that most people have now a days, information and interests that were once limited to a particular group can be now accessed by all sorts of people, making it difficult to make clear divisions of classes based on tastes and cultural inclination. As the world globalizes, this interest in categorizing people into social classes seems anachronistic and could only be justified if it had been done in an intelligent way by insightful sociologists, and with a clear purpose.