status

The British public’s idea of what makes up social class is complicated. Does a high income make you upper class – or is it to do with your parents’ wealth? What about lifestyle – what does where you shop, or whether you pay for private health insurance, say about your class? At the beginning of 2022, the New Statesman commissioned exclusive polling from Redfield & Wilton Strategies, which ran a list of crude “class markers” past a representative sample of the British public. For a bit of fun, the New Statesman data team thought we would turn these polling results into a quiz. [See also: Does your salary mean you’re rich? And what makes you upper, middle or working class? We ask the British public] We only included questions about people’s lifestyles, excluding what respondents said different careers tell them about social class. We then weighed each answer based on the proportion of people in the survey who associated each activity with each class. So how well can the British public judge your class given only the following information? var pymParent = new pym.Parent("nsmg-092-0", "https://nsmg-projects-public.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/live/nsmg-092/index.html", {}); NB: The results of this quiz are not to be taken literally. Of course middle and upper-class people can buy furniture in Argos. This article was originally published on 19 January 2022. [See also: Being middle class now means downsizing your dreams]