UPDATING OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE AND SOCIOECONOMIC SCORES - HOW THE NEW MEASURES MEASURE UP

A quarter century replication of occupational prestige studies from the 1960s permitted the development of new occupational prestige and socioeconomic status scales keyed to the 1980 occupational classification system. This paper describes the design of the 1989 General Social Survey module on occupational prestige and evaluates the quality of its data. The new scale is shown to diverge from earlier scales in small, but systematic, ways. Substantive analyses based on respondents in the 1989 survey explore the practical implications of scale differences.