The Ratio Measurement of Social Status: Some Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Social scientists have recently found the scale construction techniques developed in psychophysics relevant to the measurement problem in social science. This paper reports some efforts at the ratio measurement of social status, and some attempts at fitting functional forms to the relation between valued social characteristics (e.g., education and income in our society) and the status accorded various levels of these variables by judges from three distinct cultural groups. We take exception to some of the forms fitted by earlier researchers. To social scientists in many disciplines social status is a crucial variable in the explanation of the social, political, and economic behavior of individuals. Most modern social scientists recognize the necessity of adequate measurement of that variable; however, attempts to measure the status which is accorded to individuals by those with whom they interact seldom if ever transcend what Torgerson (1958: 22) terms "measurement by fiat." S. S. Stevens (1968:172) characterizes measurement as "the assignment of numerals to objects or events according to rules"; when the rules are assigned arbitrarily (but not necessarily capriciously), measurement by fiat obtains. This state of nature obviously exists when an index of social status is constructed from, say, income, education, and occupation, in which weights of the three components are assigned arbitrarily. In the present state of social science, weights in such indices as this are necessarily allocated arbitrarily, simply because we know so little about the nature of the relationship between the status continuum and the continua which are thought to indicate status, e.g., income, education and occupation. In a recent series of experimental investigations, Robert Hamblin has begun clarification of these relationships, using the ratio measurement techniques which have originated and matured in psychophysics; these experiments have been replicated and extended by Allen Shinn (1970). In these studies, status is treated as a consensual or "norm" variable, a variable which involves "values which are so widely held within a cultural group or subgroup that any normal adult member of that group could constitute a competent observer" (Shinn, 1970:18-19). These investigators also conceive status as an involuntary response to social stimuli. In any social system, individuals present certain characteristics to others with whom they interact. In mass society, status is likely to be accorded at the presentation of the objective stimuli of education, income, and occupation, although in less extensive social systems, status may be accorded because of superior knowledge, physical beauty, or experience, depending on the group or organization. In the short run the characteristics for which status is accorded by others, and the amount of status accorded for various amounts of these characteristics, are probably involuntary responses. Such connections between stimulus and response are established early in the socialization process and, while they may be modified by later learning, are certainly intractable in the immediate situation. As Shinn (1969:934-935) argues, "it may also be that responses to social stimuli are nonvoluntary in the short run-that an individual is in a sense a prisoner of his conditioned values." The impetus for assigning status-giving to the stimulus-response paradigm has been the corroboration of a general psychophysical law on various continua of "sensations produced in sensory receptors by physical stimuli . .. [t]he magnitude of a psychological sensation