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Table 7 Conditional response probabilities and latent class sizes for the five-class of subjective social status

From: Discordance between subjective and objective social status in contemporary China

 

Respondent type of subjective social status

Manifest variables

Upper

Upper middle

Middle

Lower middle

Lower

Education

     

 Primary school and below

0.034

0.200

0.00

0.379

0.755

 Junior high school

0.024

0.439

0.411

0.510

0.230

 Senior high school

0.135

0.328

0.517

0.106

0.031

 Tertiary

0.806

0.033

0.072

0.005

0.001

Income

     

 1st level

0.007

0.065

0.034

0.100

0.500

 2nd level

0.018

0.054

0.067

0.235

0.222

 3rd level

0.057

0.117

0.156

0.293

0.132

 4th level

0.153

0.262

0.267

0.225

0.078

 5th level

0.250

0.269

0.233

0.102

0.040

 6th level

0.515

0.233

0.243

0.044

0.028

ISEI

     

 1st level

0.007

0.000

0.052

0.435

0.888

 2nd level

0.016

0.350

0.065

0.228

0.047

 3rd level

0.083

0.309

0.241

0.171

0.027

 4th level

0.266

0.307

0.328

0.116

0.017

 5th level

0.628

0.035

0.313

0.050

0.021

 6th level

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

Class size (assigned)

12.28 %

6.08 %

21.15 %

30.59 %

29.90 %

  1. The conditional probabilities indicate the probability that an individual in a certain latent class will score a particular way on a manifest variable (McCutcheon 1987, p. 33). A respondent belonging to Class 1, for instance, has a chance close to 97 % of turning to personal contact who is “very much” trusted. Then we assign the respondents to the five latent classes to create a new categorical variable representing one’s objective status. According to McCutcheon (1987, p. 36), the assignment of observations to latent classes is probabilistic and therefore involving some error. Although not reported here, in our case, the two measures to estimate the expected proportion of classification errors and the closeness of association between the latent variable and the joint variables shows that no big uncertainty would appear during the process of assignment. As can be seen from the table, C1 has the highest probabilities of reporting the highest level of education, income, and occupations, while C5 has the lowest probabilities of these. We therefore label C1 through C5 upper class (12.28 %), upper middle class (6.08 %), middle class (21.15 %), lower middle class (30.59 %), and lower class (29.90 %), respectively