EVALUATIONS OF OCCUPATIONS BY IRISH RURAL ADOLESCENTS ON THE BASIS OF PRESTIGE AND DIFFICULTY OF ACHIEVEMENT.

A method is presented of Guttman scaling responses to two questions dealing with the relative prestige and difficulty of achievement of occupations. The research was carried out in an Irish rural community in 1965 in the course of a study dealing with the migration planning of rural youth. The analysis yielded two quasi-scales. Both scales gave coefficients of reproducibility of .89, and the other coefficients alto did not meet the requirements necessary to be considered fully unidimensional scales. A comparison of the relative prestige rankings of 14 occupations from this scale and the North-Hatt scale gave a Spearman rank order correlation of .88; and a similar comparison of six occupations with Hall and Jones' rankings for Britain of .94. The correlation of the rankings of 19 occupations common to the prestige and ’difficulty’ scales, here derived, yielded a Spearman rank order correlation of only .51. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]