NRS Social Grade and Class

How do market research companies allocate people?

In The Guardian, Ash Sarkar (Novara Media) argued that using social grades to “decry Labour’s loss of the working class is completely and utterly flawed”, and “fraff” (nonsense).

The article considers the social grade system used by market research companies.

How NRS Social Grades work

In the National Readership Survey, households are allocated a social grade based on the occupation on the household’s chief income earner. For example, the ‘A’ grade is assigned to:

• Professionals; very senior managers in business; top-level civil servants.
• Retired people who worked in a grade A job.
• People whose late spouse or civil partner worked in a grade A job.

There are criteria for grades A, B, C1, C2, D and E. The brackets ‘ABC1’ and ‘C2DE’ are then commonly used to describe ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ groups respectively.

Social categorisation systems have strengths and flaws. As Sarkar highlights, the split is reflective of manual and non-manual work — as “all other non-manual workers” are placed in the ‘C1’ grade.

There are other classification systems used in market and social research, such as the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC), Acorn, and Mosaic consumer groups.