Compare methods

	Duncan Socioeconomic Index	Occupational Prestige Scale
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1961	1947 (NORC); 1977 (SIOPS); 1989 GSS update
Originator	Otis Dudley Duncan	Cecil North & Paul Hatt (NORC); Donald Treiman (international)
Type	Composite occupational status score from education and income	Survey-based ranking of the social standing of occupations
Seminal source	Duncan, O. D. (1961). A socioeconomic index for all occupations. In A. J. Reiss Jr. (Ed.), Occupations and Social Status (pp. 109–138). Free Press of Glencoe.	Treiman, D. J. (1977). Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective. Academic Press. ISBN: 978-0-12-698750-8
Aliases	Duncan SEI, socioeconomic index for occupations, SEI score, Duncan's index	occupational prestige score, prestige scale, NORC prestige scale, Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale (SIOPS)
Related	5	5
Summary	The Duncan Socioeconomic Index (SEI), created by Otis Dudley Duncan in 1961, assigns each occupation a socioeconomic status score derived from the education and income of its incumbents. Duncan calibrated the score by regressing the prestige ratings of a limited set of occupations on the percentage of incumbents with high education and high income, then used that equation to predict a status score for every occupation in the census. The SEI thus extends a small number of prestige ratings to the entire occupational structure on a 0–100 scale.	An occupational prestige scale ranks occupations by their general social standing as judged by the public. In the classic design, survey respondents rate a list of occupations on a scale from excellent to poor standing, and the average rating for each occupation, rescaled to 0–100, is its prestige score. These scores have proven remarkably stable over time and strikingly similar across very different societies, making prestige one of the most robust measures in stratification research and the empirical anchor for socioeconomic indexes.