Becker - Evidence

In the early 1960s, Paul Wallin and Leslie C. Waldo, two Stanford sociologists, wanted to learn how social class affected childrens school performance (a question that still concerns social scientists). They administered a questionnaire to 2,002 eighth-grade boys and girls. To measure social class, they asked the children to answer a question from August Hollingsheads then well known and often used Index of Social Position (the Hollingshead version assigned family class position based on the answers to this question and a similar question about education):

[Describe] your real father, if you live with him. If you are not living with your real father answer... about the man you live with who is supposed to be taking his place. It may be a step-father, foster father, an uncle or somebody else.

Most of the time does he work for himself or for somebody else?

____ he works for himself or has his own business

____ he works for somebody else

____ I dont know what he does

What is his work or job most of the time?

He _________________________. (Wallin and Waldo 1964, 291)

The two sociologists supplemented the sometimes sketchy answers with two additional sources of information: school records and records kept by school nurses.

Wallin and Waldo dont describe the content of their research or the uses they intended these data for. Nor do they discuss the problems of meaning Ill raise shortly. But they probably thought a fathers occupation would serve as a substantial clue to (if not a definitive measurement of) social class, a combination of the economic and social realities of the parents way of life and the lives their children might have. They thought this report of the work the father did, this single fact, would give them an indirect way to guess at the familys income and wealth, and thus an inexact, perhaps not explicitly formulated but nevertheless not meaningless, measure of the parents hopes for their childrens education. And, beyond that, the way of life and (why not?) the family culture that would send the children into the adult world with what we now call cultural as well as economic capital, opening some possibilities to them and closing off othersall this related to the level the father reached on the Hollingshead scale. Every social scientist who puts such questions into a questionnaire has some version of these uses in mind.

Knowing the familys social position would almost surely suggest more specific imagery readers could use to flesh out the implications of class position. Researchers often invoke such images when they write about the theoretical implications of a projects results. The first volume of W. Lloyd Warners Yankee City Series (194159), at the time of the Wallin-Waldo research a well-known years-long study, in an anthropological style, of a small New England community contained a series of lengthy and detailed composite portraits (constructed from details pulled out of material on many somewhat similar families) of family life at different class levels, from lower-lower to upper-upper. And James Bossards studies of family table talk (1943, 1944), based on verbatim accounts of what researchers heard real families say over their meals, gave examples of the mechanisms at work in daily life that might create an observable link between the work the father did and the kind of opportunities and life it opened up for childrenall of this being what the idea (you could say, as many people often do say, the concept) of social class might evoke in a social scientist stimulated by answers to such a questionnaire item. Heres Bossard:

Much of the familys sense of economic values, and the childs training in them, are indicated in the following sentences appearing repeatedly in the case material upon which this article is based. Go easy on the butter, its fifty cents a pound. Eggs are sixty cents a dozen now. Bills shoes have to be soled. What, again? Why I just paid two dollars for soles three weeks ago. I think you ought to be ashamed to waste bread when thousands of Chinese children are starving. Mother, Mary soiled her new dress. Well, she had better take care of it. We cant buy another until after Christmas. It is the absorption of values of this kind, so constant in normal family life, which constitutes such a big gap in the training of the child reared in an institution. (Bossard 1943, 300)