都市家族の主婦における階層内同質性と階層間異質性

抄録

Problem setting and the research design In recent years sociologists have developed many ways of measuring social class statuses, all of which have both merits and demerits. The method used in this study is by the ranking of occupations which follows the 1955 research study of the Japan Sociological Society, “Social Stratification and Mobility in Japan”; that is, I used following three methods jointly :
(1) occupational categories (non-manual vs. manual)
(2) prestige class (upper, middle, and lower)
(3) mixed method of subjective class identification and occupational categories (bourgeois, white-collar, and blue-collar)
It goes without saying that in modern industrial societies the major index of social class position is the occupation, and the composite unit of class structure is the family. Accordingly, the primary determinant of social statuses of wives consist in their husbands' occupations ; the statuses are “shared by family members”.
We can sum up the objectives of our research as follows :
(1) investigating the family structure and other beckground items.
(2) investigating the social class difference in social attitudes.
(3) investigating the social class difference in various modes of life.
(4) investigating the rate of social class endogamy by means of social mobility through marriage.
Analysis of the data (1) The mean number of household members is 4.5 ; 11 percent live together with husbands' parents, 9 percent with wives' parents, and five percent with the eldest sons and his families ; the rate of nuclear families is 76 percent, and that of extended families composed of two generations couples is 24 percent. These rates show us that the family structure in Tokyo is, at least on the structural level, far more modernized than usually thought of. In subjective class identification 59 percent said “working class”, which is saliently less than the rate of male samples in Japan Sociological Society's research, 74 percent. Inversely, the rate of answers “middle class” is 10 percent higher than that of male samples
(2) We used the criteria of “familistic” value attitudes as expressed in intra-family human relations. But we can only partially find social class differences in these items. Upper class sons are more inclined to live separately from their parents after mariage than lower class sons, and they think that married sons and their old parents must have an independent household. Upper class wives are more individualistic than lower class wives. Apparently in these items, upper class families are less “familistic” than lowers. In familistic ideologies about kôkô (filial piety), however, the situation is reversed, with lower class wives ranking highest.
(3) With respect to the social class differences in life style, we took the following four items : 1. Mass comunication contacts. Lower class wives have less contacts with newspapers but more with radio. The latter fact is due to the TV. diffusion in upper class families. 2. Personal communication contacts. Upper classes speak more about child education and voting, lower classes speak more about prices of commodities and moving pictures. 3. Role performance pattern required of wives. In this items we cannot find any consistent class differences. 4. “Going-out” companions. Lower classes have less chance to go out with others.