Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The aim of the Great British Class Survey project was to understand the landscape of class and stratification in contemporary Great Britain. It was a joint project between the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Lab UK, BBC Current Affairs, and a team of academic researchers. The BBC initiated the research as part of an interest in exploring class dynamics in the UK in a new way, both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, the set of questions was inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's 'capitals' approach to social stratification; thus many questions are similar or identical to those in the Culture, Class, and Social Exclusion survey carried out by some of the academic team in 2003-2005. Methodologically, the GBCS was primarily carried out online, and included an interactive component as well as integration into social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The survey was widely publicized by the BBC, and completed by 326,712 respondents - 298,571 of them in the UK. Because the GBCS was a non-representative, non-random-sample survey, respondents were disproportionately university-educated and higher-income, paralleling the demographics of BBC viewership. A representative sample survey with identical questions was also carried out by the research firm GfK in order to facilitate comparison between GBCS respondents and the population of the UK as a whole.

The GBCS web survey is no longer online, but the BBC 'Class Calculator', derived from the initial analysis of the survey, is available.
Main Topics:

Topics covered in the GBCS and GfK surveys included cultural participation and tastes, social network and social capital, income and occupation, attitudes towards social mobility, media consumption, and political participation.