How we measure social position is vital to our ability to account for different aspects – imagined or real – of the stratification order. This research note surveys applied research and quantifies differences in the way researchers study stratification. It analyses all research articles published from 2015-2019 in the five most-cited sociological journals and ISA RC28's official publication. We focus on empirical articles with a substantive focus on occupation-based stratification. Empirically, we observe a dominance of income as a measure for social position. Social class is a close second trailed by status, prestige, and desegregated occupational measures. Among social class measures, researchers prefer EGP-like schemas and apply them as a paradigmatic "one-size-fits-all" measure in diverse fields of application.

In social stratification research, the most frequently used social class schema are based on employment relations (EGP and ESEC). These schemes have been propelled to paradigms for research on social mobility and educational inequalities and applied in cross-national research for both genders. Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we examine their criterion and construct validity across 31 countries and for both genders. We investigate whether classes are well-delineated by the theoretically assumed dimensions of employment relations and we assess how several measures of occupational advantage differ across classes. We find broad similarity in the criterion validity of EGP and ESEC across genders and countries as well as satisfactory levels of construct validity. However, the salariat classes are too heterogeneous and their boundaries with the intermediate classes are blurred. To improve the measurement of social class, we propose to differentiate managerial and professional occupations within the lower and higher salariat respectively. We show that implementing these distinctions in ESEC and EGP improves their criterion validity and allows to better identify privileged positions.

Deutsch: Darüber, wie die soziale Position in einer Gesellschaft am besten gemessen werden sollte, besteht keine Einigkeit. Da die Operationalisierung jedoch weitreichende Folgen für Forschungsdesign und Interpretation der Ergebnisse hat, werden hier sieben Konzeptionen sozialer Positionen auf ihre Erklärungskraft für ganz unterschiedliche Phänomene hin verglichen. Die Analyse sucht damit die vor allem methodische Frage zu beantworten, ob und wie sich die einzelnen Klassenmessungen in ihrer Erklärungskraft bezüglich Stratifikation und Klassenungleichheit bei 35 Eigenschaften von rund 25.000 Allbus-Befragten in Deutschland unterscheiden. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass Klassenzugehörigkeit Menschen nur in wenigen der hier untersuchten Eigenschaften wirklich stratifiziert. Gleichzeitig lassen sich aber bedeutende Klassenungleichheiten bei objektiven Statusindikatoren und intergenerationalen Mobilitätsmessungen finden. Während insgesamt Mikroklassen die höchste Erklärungskraft aufweisen, sind die Unterschiede in Bereichen, in denen aggregierte Klassifikationen eine besondere Erklärungsleistung für sich beanspruchen, marginal. Die Ergebnisse empfehlen neben den quasi paradigmatischen ESEC-Klassen auch andere der hier vorgestellten Klassifizierungen ergänzend in der Ungleichheitsanalyse einzusetzen. English: There is little agreement how to best measure social class position in contemporary societies. The chosen measurement, however, has substantial implications for a study‘s design and the interpretation of its findings. Therefore, I empirically compare the explanatory power of nine alternative social class concepts regarding their ability to map stratification and identify class inequality. The analysis is repeated for 35 characteristics measured in the Allbus data 1980 to 2018 for almost 25,000 individuals. Results indicate that class membership stratifies only few of the studied attributes. At the same time class concepts are able to detect meaningful class inequality especially in terms of but not limited to objective SES measures and social mobility indicators. While microclasses outperform more aggregated class measures in general, the differences are rather small in subject areas for which the latter theoretically claim particular explanatory power. In the spirit of parsimony, the results hence would seem to suggest the use of the more aggregated classifications at least with regard to some subject matters. I suggest to complement the almost exclusive usage of ESEC in contemporary stratification research with alternative class measures.