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Achieved status is a concept developed by the anthropologist Ralph Linton for a social position that a person can acquire on the basis of merit and is earned or chosen through one's own effort. It is the opposite of ascribed status and reflects personal skills, abilities, and efforts.
Ascribed statuses are fixed for an individual at birth, while achieved status is determined by social rewards an individual acquires during his or her lifetime as a result of the exercise of ability and/or perseverance. [17] Examples of ascribed status include castes, race, and beauty among others. Meanwhile, achieved statuses are akin to one's ...
Ascribed characteristics, as used in the social sciences, refers to properties of an individual attained at birth, by inheritance, or through the aging process. The individual has very little, if any, control over these characteristics. [ 1 ]
Peter M. Blau (1918–2002) and Otis Duncan (1921–2004) were the first sociologists to isolate the concept of status attainment. Their initial thesis stated that the lower the level from which a person starts, the greater is the probability that he will be upwardly mobile, simply because many more occupational destinations entail upward mobility for men with low origins than for those with ...
Achieved characteristics are those which a person earns or chooses; examples include level of education, marital status, leadership status and other measures of merit. In most societies, an individual's social status is a combination of ascribed and achieved factors.
When one of these statuses overpowers the others it can be determined as one's master status. An achieved status that becomes a master status is accompanied by a rite of passage, important life events where a person is changed from one type of person into another. Marriage is one example, where a person transforms from single to spouse.
An example of an ascribed reversible status is the status of citizenship. An example of ascribed irreversible status is age. His conclusion is based on the fact that an ascribed status within a social structure is indicative of the behavior that one can exhibit but it does not explain the action itself.
Additional variables include those that describe other ascribed and achieved characteristics such as occupation and skill levels, age, education level, education level of parents, and geographic area. Some of these variables may have both causal and intervening effects on social status and stratification.