Academic excellence for business and the professions
Doing Social Science with The BBC:
Reflections on the Great
British Class Survey
‘Experiment’
Sam Friedman, City University
Project team: Mike Savage, Fiona Devine, Niall
Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johs
Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Andrew Miles
April 3rd 2013
An Explosive Launch
• Over 7 million hits on the BBC website
• NYT most ‘shared’ world new story of 2013
• One of most tweeted articles in history of social
science (altmetric.com)
• One of the most popular and controversial
pieces of sociology ever conducted in UK
• A model for the future?
Emergent Service Workers of the World Unite!
‘A political party - but the good kind’
A Rocky Road: The
Story of the GBCS
• Project developed by BBC’s Lab UK
• Attempted to establish ‘public value’ via:
• The creation of peer-reviewed scientific knowledge
• Popular content for BBC broadcast and web
• Initial response to survey was strong with 163,000
taking part...the largest survey on class ever!
A Stormy Relationship
• Two problems emerged:
1. Time according to academics vs. time
according to BBC journalists!
2. The survey sample – highly skewed towards
educated middle class (The BBC audience?)
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•
•
•
26% have a post-graduate qualification (10% UK)
25% have an arts/ humanities degree (5% UK)
60% are in professional jobs (23% UK)
1.9% (3,007) have household income of £200k+
(0.3%? UK)
Finding a Way Forward
• Latent class analysis allowed us to assess how
underlying social classes could be defined from
specific combinations of economic, social and
cultural capital.
• Main breakthrough when web survey results were
weighted to link to the national survey
• BBC decided to launch results as a news story
rather than through a documentary
Elite
Establish
ed
middle
class
£47 184
New
affluent
workers
Emergent Precariat
service
workers
£29 252
Technical Tradition
middle
al
classs
working
class
£37 428 £13 305
£21 048
£8 253
£65 844
£1 138
£793
Household
income
£89 082
Household
savings
£142,458 £26 090
£4 918
House value
£325 000 £176834
£128 639 £163 362 £127 174 £17 968
£26 948
Social contact
score
50.1
45.3
37.8
53.5
41.5
38.3
29.9
Social contact
number
16.2
17.0
16.9
3.6
9.8
14.8
6.7
Highbrow
cultural capital
16.9
13.7
6.9
9.2
10.8
9.6
6.0
Emerging
cultural capital
14.4
16.5
14.8
11.4
6.5
17.5
8.4
£9 500
The Results at a Glance
• The two ‘traditional’ social classes (middle and
working) only comprise 39% of the population
• There is clear evidence for social polarisation
through the existence of an ‘elite’ and a ‘precariat’
• We see the ‘fracturing’ of the middle classes with
a ‘technical’ and ‘affluent’ component
• We also see evidence for a relatively youthful
‘emergent’ class with cultural capital but relatively
poor labour market position.
Translating
Different Types of
Knowledge
• How do you translate complex academic findings
into media-friendly formats?
• Controversy of the BBC ‘Class Calculator’
• A step too far?
Lessons for the Future
• A success?
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Unprecedented public interest
Unique experiment in digital social science
Successful collaboration between sociology and BBC
But scientific impact will take years to assess
And Lab UK to close…
Does academic knowledge have a role in creating
and cultivating public value at the BBC?