Toward a Revised Socioeconomic Index using the American Community Survey, 2000-2006

This report presents the application of a new set of socioeconomic indexes (SEIs) of occupations developed using the American Community Survey (ACS). In these analyses, the new SEIs are used to characterize the socioeconomic standings of household heads and spouses associated with samples of children age 6-18 years. These children were extracted from two independent sources: the pooled 2000-2005 October Current Population Survey (CPS) and the 2005 ACS. We compared the new measures with the 1990-based measures from Hauser and Warren (1997) by performing correlation and regression analyses on the sample data to examine the relationships among three status-attainment variables -- education, occupation and income.
Since the development of Duncan’s SEI (1961) for measuring the occupational attainment of individuals, subsequent measures have been updated not only to improve the validity of the measure but also to accommodate changes in the way occupation has been measured and classified. SEIs provide researchers with succinct and reliable measures for summarizing individuals’ or households’ positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy. With growing complexity and details in the new occupation classification system, many categories in the 2000 Census occupation codes, for example, cannot find their counterparts in the previous listings and thus the SEI is due for another update. The analyses presented in this report serve as a “test-drive” for the new SEIs.
The results from our preliminary analyses indicate that despite the fact that the two pairs of occupational measures are not in the exact same metric, they behave very similarly in terms of their dependence on educational attainment, explanatory power on various earning and income measures and differentials across gender and race-ethnicity groups.