Occupational status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

As contemporary and historical studies of occupational the latter problem satisfactorily, though one might exstratification multiply, social scientists display continupect many sources of historical data to be at least as ing ambivalence about the invariance of occupational susceptible to response variability as are contemporary status hierarchies across time and space. On one hand, social surveys. macro-social theories demand comparative study, for which common measurement tools are a necessity. Probably Donald Treiman has been the leading proponent of comparability in the measurement of occupational prestige. On the other hand, serious students of specific societies or communities-past or present-are sensitized by inclination, training, and experience to culturally or historically unique features of those settings; thus they are understandably reluctant to use a standard occupational status scale. There has been no great rush of historians, or of sociologists, to use Treiman's Standard Scale, of which the validity and generality have been sharply questioned.' My preference is comparability at the cost of validity, at least the kind of validity that is at stake as occupational status hierarchies vary across time and place. By way of an extended example, this paper first illustrates the price of choosing historic specificity. Price is a relational concept, and my argument is not that comparability is cost free, but that it is no more costly than other, casually tolerated sources of invalidity. Second;it shows how one might use linear structural models to assay the costs and benefits of standardized status measurement in other contexts. In this way it supplements contemporaneous applications of confirmatory factor models to socioeconomic scaling,' and it provides a methodological template for the more serious problem of modeling individual-level response variability in surveyor record-based studies of the stratification p r o ~ e s s . ~ No historical study has treated The Five-City Study