La valutazione sociale delle occupazioni nell’Italia contemporanea: una nuova scala per vecchie ipotesi

• Main Authors: Cinzia Meraviglia, Laura Accornero
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Rosenberg & Sellier 2007-12-01
• Series: Quaderni di Sociologia
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/qds/899

The paper presents the new version of the social desirability scale of occupations for Italy, a reputational scale whose first version was built by de Lillo and Schizzerotto (1985) following Goldthorpe and Hope (1974). First we discuss the main reasons that led the research team to undertake this task. Prestige scales are known indeed to be fairly stable across time and space; however Italian society has undergone profound changes over the last 20 years, and the stability of (the perception of) the occupational stratification needed to be proved.The research design is pretty similar to the one used in 1985; however the interviewees sample is much numerous (N = 1958) and the occupations graded amount to 686. Each occupation received around 60 evaluations; occupations have been grouped into 110 categories, which form the scale. We present the criteria which underlie the scale categories, and discuss the main features of the ranking resulting from giving them a score derived from respondents’ ratings.As a research tool, we provide the conversion rules between ISCO88 and our scale, showing that even when all the relevant information for translating the ISCO88 codes into the scores of our scale (sector of activity, self employment, etc.) is not available the conversion between the two classification tools is of a good quality.The main research hypotheses tested here is that the ratings – and so the scale – do not differ according to subgroup variations among respondents, i.e. that gender, age, education, place of residence and occupation do not influence in a systematic way respondents’ ratings. The hypothesis is confirmed, however with two exceptions. First, some occupations have been graded in a systematically different way in the different areas of the country (north west, north east, centre, south, islands), though place of residence in itself does not have an influence on the scale as a whole. Second, the highly educated rated better those occupations which require high education – though this effect is a minor one. More insight will be gained from future analyses.