And indeed, this sample skew explains why our new model of social class largely drew on the small representative national sample which we persuaded the BBC to conduct to allow us to base our model on representative data. These data are also now available from the UK Data Service along with the web survey itself.
And what data the GBCS has! self-selecting japan rcs data nature of the web survey makes formal statistical inference impossible, the large sample size makes it possible to mine down at minute scale and explore specific issues which smaller surveys can rarely unravel. Any group at the higher end of income, occupation, or education scales is present in this data in very large numbers. There are 34,245 respondents who report household income over £100,000 per year. Nearly every professional and managerial occupation has over 100 respondents, and many have thousands: there are 3,440 CEOs, 4,978 doctors, and 13,759 primary and nursery teachers. Most of the large universities have several thousand graduates who responded, so researchers can look in detail at the profiles of particular universities (when the Special Licence version becomes available). This throws up exciting possibilities for the kind of focused analysis which might allow the study of social class to operate on a more granular and detailed level.