Hiya all,

Sorry, posting my questions again as my yesterday's post was deleted (hope by accident). I was wondering if anyone could suggest a place to look for  measures of socioeconomic status, that are standardized and available in other languages than English.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Hi Rina, is it a way of comparing the SES of different ethnic groups within the UK that you want? This is not straightforward due to standard measures of SES (such as income, employment, education etc) not capturing the true experiences of many ethnic minority groups (James Nazroo among others has written a lot on this). If you are wanting cross-country measures then this would be even more complicated as the cultural meanings of various measures will differ by country.

Other considerations are the age group that you want to survey and whether it is just individual measures of SES you are interested in (as opposed to neighbourhood SES for example).

Sorry I can't be more help but I am not sure if what you want actually exists - would be interested to hear from others who know more.

Thanks a lot Tey61 - I'll look around for James Nazroo's work.

I am looking for a measure of individual SES in a developing country, there are some measures assessing SES in that country, some designed by US policy makers, some homegrown, but none of these measures are not standardized. However, it looks from what you are saying, that standard SES measure applicable for all contexts may not exist.

what about the un human development reports, or are these too broad?? http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

Thanks Ady, yes, I think these are national level data and not actual measures, meaning questions and scoring instruments. Thanks anyway :-)

There's also a good argument to be made for not using socioeconomic status as a descriptive measure. Class and socioeconomic status has, I believe, been largely supplanted by identity consuption and identity management. This is particularly true of getting at any kind of behavioural data - e.g. buying habits, consuption, travel trends and so forth. Nevertheless, I imagine that for something like healthcare/access to education and so on, socioeconomic status i.e. class is still relatively useful.