Class Images

Critics of Richard Centers’s class-perception question complain that it forces a particular class model on all interviewees. They have a point—that we need to explore other class images beyond those labeled working class and middle class—but they exaggerate its importance by claiming that the possibility of other class images necessarily invalidates the use of Centers’s fixed choices. The study of alternative class images usually begins with a simple, openended question asking people how they interpret class divisions. The bestknown of these studies is the 1962 British survey of “affluent workers” (Goldthorpe et al., 1969),¹ which posed this question