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'''Occupational prestige''' (also known as '''job prestige''') is a way for sociologists to describe the relative social class positions people have. It refers to the consensual nature of rating a job based on the belief of its worthiness. The term ''prestige'' itself refers to the admiration and respect that a particular occupation holds in a society. Occupational prestige is prestige independent of the particular individual who occupies a job. Sociologists have identified prestige rankings for more than 700 occupations based on results from a series of national surveys. They created a scale with 0 being the lowest possible score to 100 being the highest, and then ranked the occupations based on the results of the survey.<ref>{{cite web|last=Hauser|first=Robert|title=Socioeconomic Indexes for Occupations: A Review, Update, and Critique|url=http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/96-01.pdf|publisher=Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison|accessdate=26 October 2012}}</ref>
==History==
People rate the ‘general standing’ of an occupation (the most common question). It is taken to be a measure of occupational prestige and hence of the social status of occupations. Many other criteria have been proposed, including ‘social usefulness’ as well as ‘prestige’ and ‘status’ themselves. In order to obtain the scale of occupations (which is invariably taken to be national in application), respondents' ratings are aggregated.
Job prestige did not become a fully developed concept until 1947 when the [[National Opinion Research Center]] (NORC), under the leadership of Cecil C. North,<ref name="North1949">North, C., & Hart, P. K. (1949). Jobs and Occupations: A popular evaluation. ''Opinion News'', '''9''', 313.</ref> conducted a [[opinion poll|survey]] which held questions regarding age, [[education]], and [[income]] in regard to the prestige of certain [[employment|job]]s. This was the first time job prestige had ever been researched, measured, and taught. Duncan's Socioeconomic Index (DSI, SEI) <ref name=Duncan1961>Duncan, O. D. (1961). A Socioeconomic Index for all Occupations. In J. Reiss, Jr. (Ed.), Occupations and Social Status (pp. 109–138). New York: Free Press of Glencoe</ref> became one of the most important outcomes of this survey, as it gave various occupational categories different scores based on the survey results as well as the result of [[1950 United States Census|the 1950 Census of Population]]. During the 1960s the NORC did a second generation of surveys which became the basis for the socioeconomic status (SES) score until the 1980s as well as the foundation for Trieman's International Prestige Scale in 1977. Out of these surveys and research job prestige has been defined in various ways. Some definitions include:
* The consensual nature of rating a job based on the collective belief of its worthiness.
* Prestige is the measurement of the "desirability" of an occupation in terms of socioeconomic rewards.
* Prestige reflects factual, scientific knowledge about the material rewards attached to certain occupations.
Different people seem to weight these issues differently in their understanding of prestige. Most people seem to implicitly view prestige as a weighted average of income and education and this is the operational definition used in indices like DSI and ISEI. However other people (especially in the working class) seem to have more moralized notions of how much a job helps society and would, for instance, rate doctors high and lawyers low even though both jobs require postgraduate degrees and earn high incomes.<ref>Donald J. Treiman. (1977). Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective. New York: ''Academic Press''.</ref><ref>Michael Young and Peter Willmott (1956). Social Grading by Manual Workers. ''British Journal of Sociology'': '''7''': 337–345.</ref>
The indicators most commonly used to measure SES come from Duncan's (1961) Socioeconomic Index (SEI), a composite of occupational prestige, income, and education. Duncan used data from North and Hart's study of 1949 occupational prestige and census data <ref name="North1949"/> to conduct the first correlational study of the statistical relationship between education, income, and occupation. Duncan focused on white males with at least a high school education and income of $3,500 dollars or more in 1949, and found correlations among income, public-ranking of occupational prestige, and educational level of around 0.75. The study did not report whether the index included a sample of ethnic minorities.<ref name="Easton2007">Easton-Brooks, D. & Davis, A. (2007). Wealth, Traditional Socioeconomic Indicators, and The Achievement Debt. ''The Journal of Negro Education''. Washington: Fall 2007. '''76''' (4); 530–542.</ref>
The SEI model continues to influence the way researchers measure SES. The National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS:88, NCES, 1988) initially employed a measure of SES developed by Stevens and Featherman (1981) based on father's income, mother's income, father's education, mother's education, and father's and mother's occupation as rated by the SEI model. In the first-year follow-up study, the [[National Center for Education Statistics]] (1990) used the Nakao and Treas (1994) revised SEI model.
<ref name="Nakao">Nakao, K., & Treas, J. (1994). Updating Occupational Prestige and Socioeconomic Scores: How the new measures measure up. ''Sociological Methodology'', '''24''', 1–72.</ref>
==Calculating occupational prestige in the United States==
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