Lisa A. Keister, Richard Benton, James Moody
Sociological Science, August 3, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a28
Abstract
Treating people as cases that are proximate in a behavior space—representing lifestyles—rather than as markers of single variables has a long history in sociology. Yet, because it is difficult to find analytically tractable ways to implement this idea, this approach is rarely used. We take seriously the idea that people are whole packages, and we use household spending to identify groups who occupy similar positions in social space. Using detailed data on household consumption, we identify eight positions that are clearly similar in lifestyle. We then study how the lifestyles we identify are associated with saving, an important measure of household well-being. We find that households cluster into distinct lifestyles based on similarities and differences in consumption. These lifestyles are meaningfully related in social space and save in distinct ways that have important implications for understanding inequality and stratification.
Treating people as cases that are proximate in a behavior space—representing lifestyles—rather than as markers of single variables has a long history in sociology. Yet, because it is difficult to find analytically tractable ways to implement this idea, this approach is rarely used. We take seriously the idea that people are whole packages, and we use household spending to identify groups who occupy similar positions in social space. Using detailed data on household consumption, we identify eight positions that are clearly similar in lifestyle. We then study how the lifestyles we identify are associated with saving, an important measure of household well-being. We find that households cluster into distinct lifestyles based on similarities and differences in consumption. These lifestyles are meaningfully related in social space and save in distinct ways that have important implications for understanding inequality and stratification.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
- Citation: Keister, Lisa A., Richard Benton, and James Moody. 2016. “Lifestyles through Expenditures: A Case-Based Approach to Saving.” Sociological Science 3: 650-684.
- Received: March 17, 2016
- Accepted: April 12, 2016
- Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
- DOI: 10.15195/v3.a28
No reactions yet.