Measuring occupational prestige : updating the magnitude-prestige-scale

Abstract

"One's occupation is one of the central dimensions of social inequality in modern societies. For this reason, measuring instruments based on occupations are an important tool for capturing degrees of social inequality within the framework of empirical surveys. The coded occupational activity of the persons surveyed serves - usually via specific occupational classifications - as a basis for the preparation of such scales. Here one must mention the various different versions of the International Standard Classification of Occupations (in particular ISCO68 and ISCO88) and above all the customary German classification of occupations (KldB) used within the framework of the official statistics of the Federal Republic of Germany. What is problematical in this connection is that the coding of occupational activities often only takes place in one, at best two of these occupational classifications because of the effort necessary to do this and the resulting costs. If one uses data within the framework of secondary analyses, one does not as a rule have any influence on which occupational classification has been applied. That is why it is important to provide different versions of the individual scales for various classification schemes. If one looks as scales that were constructed on the basis of internationally comparable data, then different instruments are already available for both versions of the ISCO classification in the form of the SIOPS scale as well as the International Socio Economic Index (ISEI). Among the instruments based on national data, the Magnitude Prestige Scale (MPS) should be mentioned in particular. This is up to now only available for various different versions of the KldB, along with the original version for ISCO68. A conversion of the scale to ISCO88, which is frequently used within the framework of social science surveys, has not been undertaken yet. This is to be done here in this article." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Christoph, B. (2006): Zur Messung des Berufsprestiges. Aktualisierung der Magnitude-Prestigeskala. In: K.- S. Rehberg (Hrsg.) (2006): Soziale Ungleichheit, Kulturelle Unterschiede : Verhandlungen des 32. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in München 2004. 2 Bände, p. 2005-2020.