Subjective Social Class in America: 1945-68

Evidence from a series of national samples shows no decline in working-class identification in the United States since 1945. The disagreement between these results and those of Tucker for 1963 appears to be the consequence of different question wordings and an implicitly different conceptualization of “class.” The Tucker question prompted the modal respondent to rank himself in terms of an evaluative dimension rather than to identify himself with a group. The 1963 study probably gives a minimum estimate of “working-class consciousness”; this interpretation is more consistent with evidence from the other studies.