Basic sociology question. I have a student asking me how to recode professions (NOC-S) into "social classes" (upper, middle, working class). He wanted to do it with those 10 categories. I told him there is no way you can do that with such broad domains of activity since the lawyer is in the same category as the legal assistant and an administrator is in the same group as the secretary. So he asked me what about those 30 categories. It still looks problematic to me. You have more distinctions between professional and technical occupations but how do you define what fits into "middle class"? So to anyone who is familiar with this, my question is are there "official norms" to divide the National Occupational Classification into "social classes" and what level of detail is necessary to do so? I found this article of Boyd in the Canadian Review of Sociology (appendix B) that defines the Boyd-NP scores for the 2001 census. Are those « officially » recognized and can they be adapted to the 2011 NHS?
A Socioeconomic Scale for Canada: Measuring Occupational Status from the Census
Monica Boyd, University of Toronto
Canadian Review of Sociology
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-618X.2008.00003.x
Answer 1:
There used to be two scales - Pineo-Porter classifications, and the Blishen scale – each SOC code was assigned a value which mapped to “class”. If there is a crosswalk between NOC and SOC, it might be able to update Pineo-Porter classifications or the Blishen codes to the NOC … or someone might even have already done so!
Take a look at https://www.jstor.org/stable/20460616?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents –
A Scale of Occupational Prestige in Canada, Based on NOC Major Groups
John Goyder and Kristyn Frank
The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie
Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 2007), pp. 63-83
Published by: Canadian Journal of Sociology
DOI: 10.2307/20460616
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20460616
Page Count: 21
Answer 2:
Subject Matter does not use the term ‘social classes’ when classifying occupations so there is no ‘official norm’ at Statistics Canada.
For the ‘Canadian Review of Sociology’ article we couldn’t open the full article and not sure what is mentioned in appendix B.
But from the text in the ‘Abstract’ it looks like the article mentioned ‘Nam-powers-Boyd’ method was used for Census of Occupation and not Census of Population.”
Answer 1:
There used to be two scales - Pineo-Porter classifications, and the Blishen scale – each SOC code was assigned a value which mapped to “class”. If there is a crosswalk between NOC and SOC, it might be able to update Pineo-Porter classifications or the Blishen codes to the NOC … or someone might even have already done so!
Take a look at https://www.jstor.org/stable/20460616?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents –
A Scale of Occupational Prestige in Canada, Based on NOC Major Groups
John Goyder and Kristyn Frank
The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie
Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 2007), pp. 63-83
Published by: Canadian Journal of Sociology
DOI: 10.2307/20460616
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20460616
Page Count: 21
Answer 2:
Subject Matter does not use the term ‘social classes’ when classifying occupations so there is no ‘official norm’ at Statistics Canada.
For the ‘Canadian Review of Sociology’ article we couldn’t open the full article and not sure what is mentioned in appendix B.
But from the text in the ‘Abstract’ it looks like the article mentioned ‘Nam-powers-Boyd’ method was used for Census of Occupation and not Census of Population.”
