Study Context

This study is being undertaken as part of a PhD  in the Department of Information Studies at UCL by Darren Flynn. The project has been reviewed by UCL's Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Ethics Committee (registration #26715/001). 

The project is being supervised by Dr Alison Hicks, Professor Annemaree Lloyd and Dr Alison Sizer. 

Defining and explaining social class and background.

In social research, social class is one way in which researchers group complex individuals in society in order to make comparisons, conclusions and generalisations. Social class can be understood in many different ways and different theorists have developed many different ways of understanding social class and methods for grouping individuals into a social class.  These can include factors like type of job someone does, how much they earn or their level of education. These can produce models of society with many different types and degrees of social classes within them. 

Some studies might also ask people to self-identify within a social class instead of using different factors. These can help to understand how people feel they identify but can be difficult to compare or to describe a broad group as different people will interpret a social class in different ways. That said, self-identification can be useful in looking at how an individual or group sees themselves. 

This study is designed around the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. In Bourdieu's theories, social class is understood as being based on an individual's background. Bourdieu identifies three core areas that make up an individual's social class background:

Economic capital: the financial and material resources such as income, property ownership and assets someone (or their immediate family) has. 

Cultural capital: the knowledge, behavioural and cultural background someone experienced growing up (e.g. parents' level of education, leisure preferences and cultural knowledge).

Social capital: the social networks someone experienced growing up, such as the types and varieties of people someone was acquainted with. 

The questionnaire asks questions based around these three areas. The answers respondents give don't definitively state that this person is 'working class' or this person is 'middle class' but will allow the researcher to look at differences between respondents on these measures and group people with similar social backgrounds together to make comparisons.  

The Questionnaire

The questionnaire is modelled on two main sources:

1. The Great British Class Survey by Savage et al. (2013)

2. The UK Civil Service recommended measures for measuring the socioeconomic background of your workforce (2018

If you are interested in the questionnaire but do not or cannot participate in the survey, you can download a blank copy of the questionnaire below.