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Many Americans believe in a social class system that has three different groups or classes: the American rich (upper class), the American middle class, and the American poor.
There is a surprising amount of disagreement among sociologists on the number of social classes in the United States and even on how to measure social class membership. We first look at the measurement issue and then discuss the number and types of classes sociologists have delineated.
25 maj 2016 · In this chart from the textbook, we can see that there is a distinction between who fits into which social classes (which are a shorthand measure) and who identifies with each class: and the working class has the largest percentage of people who define themselves as a member, with 42.4% for the middle class.
In this section we will explore how class operates in the United States. We will begin by exploring those high up in the class hierarchy and then discuss the middle class. We will end by examining poverty in the United States, how it is patterned, and explanations for its persistence.
A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the working class, middle class, and upper class. Membership of a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.
Over the decades, sociologists have outlined as many as six or seven social classes, but for the sake of clarity, we will limit ourselves to the four social classes included in Figure 7.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership”: the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class.
There are competing models for thinking about social classes in the U.S. — most Americans recognize a three-tier structure that includes the upper, middle, and lower classes, but variations delineate an upper-middle class and a working class.
