Introduction

The interaction between later life and social class has been measured from two opposite standpoints. The first tends to place ‘old age’ on the side of the independent variables and highlights how retirement arises as a trigger of loss and a factor of downward social mobility. This loss is substantiated in different aspects, not only the loss of income and material security as a direct result of exiting the labour market, but also loss as an indirect result of: growing unmet needs for material resources; declining health and needs for care; rising costs of living coupled with the deterioration of pension systems; loss of social status as a result of the weakening of social networks and social participation; loss of energy and enthusiasm, often as a result of deteriorating health; as well as dissolution of workplace-based networks, leading to isolation. The second approach to how later life intersects with social class tends to place the latter on the dependent variable side. It highlights the social trajectories of becoming ‘old’ and is more focused on how past class trajectories become determining factors of the way individuals experience the ageing process. This view is more concerned with analysing how the material and social conditions associated with different class positions act as significant discriminators in retirement, and explaining inequalities and differences in a variety of aspects of individual and group life. Irrespective of the functional role assigned to social class in social theory on ageing, most scholars tend to base their operational definitions of the concept in the well-established typologies of social class, and without taking into consideration the need to assess how well those typologies perform when applied to older groups. The starting question of this chapter is: ‘How can we measure social class in later life?’. It is a question worth asking at the current stage of development of social theories on ageing, even though we do not have a straightforward answer.

The goal of this chapter is to discuss the concept of social class in its appropriateness to analyse inequalities and social divisions with the specific goal of clarifying how well existing empirical measurement tools of the concept perform when addressing older people's lives.