There are quite a lot of socioeconomic indcators someone can use (e.g. education, income, jobposition, multidimensional indizes, poverty, subjectiv social status, area level indocators, and so on).
Which of all the possible operationalizations do you use and why?
One of the indicator used quite often is SES-- socioeconomic status. This one is a combination of education, income, and employment and was developed long long ago after statisticians observed consistent high correlations between/among all three factors. One challenge for you would be to see (research) if these 3 still hold today as SES.
Thanks for this answer. A multidimensional index for sure is an interesting solution (and stil is in use although not that often as for example education).
Regarding this indicator I see 2 problems:
1. How do you deal with status inconsistency? Can good income erase the disadvantages caused by bad education (and vice versa)?
2. Use of multidimensional indices makes it difficult to establish causal relationships. I mean if you see correaltion of the index with an output variable it s difficult to explain it (what has caused the relationship?).
Re cause/causal: There is no "causal " relationship in anything even biology, only multi-causal and can never be really shown. The multicasual theory from epidemiology shows that there is no single cause for any disease, as there are my other factors that have to be present for the "germ" (for e.g) for the disease to appear. This is much more so in the social sciences, where we can only talk about "contributing" factors and "cause has no scientific place to be talked abut.
Status can be used in several ways and in SES, as defined for social data, has nothing to do with social position (the usual meaning among laymen). SES is a very specific derived operational definition used in social science referring to a majority never to an entire population (as everything and nothing in social science ever does) and yes debated for many years.
Any researcher can use it or not and select instead whatever he or she thinks will be useful for their research, as long as it can be operationalized, and it makes sense, is logical, and is not anecdotal, for e.g. income, but not what car, jewelry, or size of house a person owns.
Thank you for your answers.
First of all, I agree that status is always a process, not something someone achieve ones and forever. But nevertheless, if we do research we need a way to establish the status of a given person for the time point under research. Going back to Weber may be a good way to do so, thank you for that hint.
Regarding the causal thing: I agree, that there is no single causal relationship. What I menat was: If we see a correlation for example between social status and a certain illness (or whatever), we want to know, why this relationship exists and which hypothetical different ways the pathway from status to the illnes follows. What I meant is that this is more diffcut to establish for a multidimensional status than for single indicators.
To be specific about what is under discussion, it is not a given that SES is a process that changes ("status" can be defined differently especially in research), as would studies on persistent poverty would show, as well as knowledge of the rich, who are, have been and will remain so (need I name names?). This is also dependent on geographical location, as there are countries/regions where this is not likely to change without radical changes (need I name names?).
Again, a researcher can use what he decides in a study, but it has to be defined, be logical and be useful for his/her research. I may decide to do a study on lower education/high income (jobs with very high wages that require no college degree and sometimes no special training) to show that SES may not always hold, but those would be special circumstances, hence the study. ( US here)
Last, but not least, country/region is very important in defining /selecting factors to identify individual, group or population "status" vis-a-vis income or social standing; "socioeconomic" --use of this term is, in effect, apriori definition of "status."
Thanks again for your very useful comments. I am not thinking about a concrete research idea, I am just thinking about the (theoretically and empirically) very differnt options to operationalize this abstract concept named status (or socioeconomic status) and about advantages and disadvantages (and consequences) of different types of operationalizations.
Regarding society in focus I am most interested in "modern" (post)industrial societies (since I live and conduct my research in one).
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