Researchers have long been interested in the occupational position of individuals, both because occupations are the result of a prior events such as the level of education or the type of vocational training, and because occupations are closely associated with earnings, and thus with the level of consumption and type of life style afforded. As well, a person's occupation may capture certain risks, such as occupational accidents and it may indicate the standard of living available to other family members, thus serving as a measure of the socioeconomic origins of later generations. Since the 1950s, sociologists have sought to transform census occupational classifications into interval scales in order to take advantage of multivariate methods of analysis. I was familiar with these scales in some of my early work on social inequality, and in the 1980s I became interested in the possibility that gender specific scales existed. Later I worked with Charles Nam, Florida State University to produce socioeconomic scores for occupations in the United States, using a methodology he developed. More recently I have taken the Canadian 2001 Census classification of occupations and have transformed them into socioeconomic scores, suitable for multivariate analysis both as independent and dependent variables.

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