The Distribution of Advantage within the Class Schema: Work Income and Promotion Prospects

Abstract

The issue of assessing a schema’s validity is regularly brought up in the literature on class. Two types of validity assessment have been distinguished: construct validation and criterion validation (Evans, 1992; 1996; Rose and O’Reilly, 1998). Construct validation is the favoured mode in the social sciences. It involves assessing whether a schema predicts other variables in theoretically stipulated ways. For example, it may be examined whether an operationalized measure of class explains variance in political behaviour, housing tenancy or health records. However, if the schema fails to account for differences in voting behaviour, it is unclear whether the schema must be blamed for faulty operationalization of social class or whether there simply is no systematic link between political partisanship and social class (see Evans, 1992; Evans and Mills, 1998). For this reason, Evans (1992) stresses the necessity to also assess the criterion-related validity of a class schema. In other words, to examine whether a class schema effectively measures what it is intended to measure. In the case of the Goldthorpe schema, this involves studying whether the measures of social class successfully reflect differences in the employment relationship such as more or less advantaged working conditions, the presence or absence of promotion prospects or the extent of control over work tasks (Evans, 1992, 1996; Evans and Mills, 1998, 2000).