Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 1961-1962: Special Licence Access

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.A selected sample of this study, listed under SN 6512: Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 1961-1962, is available via the UK Data Service Qualibank, an online tool for browsing, searching and citing the content of selected qualitative data collections held at the UK Data Service. The 'Affluent Worker' project was undertaken to test empirically the thesis of working class embourgeoisement. Conducted in the early 1960s, the empirical study consisted of interviews with manual workers and their wives. The original project was exploring the social and cultural influences on manual workers’ class identities. Although the researchers rejected the original embourgeoisement thesis that working class people were becoming assimilated to the middle classes, they did argue that traditional working class norms had been adapted in the post war period of prosperity. They found that in place of assimilation ‘major on-going modification in manual-non manual differences were occurring at the level of values and aspirations’ (Goldthorpe et al. 1969:26). The research studied the attitudes and behaviour of high wage earners in three mass or continuous flow companies. During 1961-1962, married, male workers from three Luton factories (Vauxhall, Skefco and Laporte) were firstly interviewed at work and then, again, at home with their wives. Additionally, a sample of middle-class, white-collar workers from the same companies were interviewed only at home. A pilot of the study was conducted in Cambridge prior to the main Luton study. This Special License issue contains an additional 213 surveys from the Luton area and 12 more data files from the Cambridge area. A subset of the Luton study interviews was digitised and formed part of a wider ESRC project Living Standards, social identities and the working class in England, c.1945-c.1970. For this subset, 30 married male Vauxhall workers' completed questionnaires were selected from boxes 01 and 02 from the full collection, as the handwriting on the original papers was legible, and follow-up home interviews were available as well as the initial workplace interview. The resulting data have been collated into tabular form, within an MS Access database. The tables replicate the structure and variables of the questionnaires used in the original study. Street, place and personal names were standardised by the original investigators, and care has been taken to retain original spellings. The subset database therefore contains a total of 60 interviews, each with 464 variables. Main Topics:Social attitudes, family life, social mobility, employment, lifestyle, education, social class