Development of a model for socioeconomic classification of Brazilian households

• Grant number: 12/15038-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2012
• End date: November 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Administration - Business Administration
• Principal Investigator: José Afonso Mazzon
• Grantee: José Afonso Mazzon
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade (FEA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The American Psychological Association (APA) has called upon researchers to help overcome a literature gap: to build better socioeconomic classification models. This request stems from the importance of this variable as a moderator for research findings in diverse fields: Economics, Business Administration, Medicine, Psychology, Sociology and Education, among others. The literature review showed the existence of numerous problems, such as: using a single dimension to measure socioeconomic status; utilizing only independent metric variables, thus precluding the use of nominal and ordinal scale variables; using current income (highly sensitive to variations in the state of the economy) instead of permanent income; arbitrarily defining the number of socioeconomic strata; arbitrarily defining class cut-off points; inability to work with missing data; using the classification exclusively as an explanatory, instead of predictive variable to classify households in field research, and so on. Based on a preliminary study - already accepted for publication in a special issue of the International Journal of Research in Marketing - this paper aims to build and validate a model, which is theoretically grounded on the concept of permanent income and methodologically supported by latent class modeling. Such features render this study innovative on a global level. It is highly applicable in Brazil to support public policies and business strategies, but also adequate for application in other countries, where it has clear advantages in terms of offering comparability of the results from international studies and longitudinal research. (AU)