ABSTRACT
The proposition that American communities comprise social class structures had been formally set forth by W. Lloyd Warner and his associates in 1941 with the publication of the first volume of the Yankee City series. The validity of some of the concepts when applied to a large urban or metropolitan community has been questioned; and the issue of whether a national social class structure could be generalized from studies of individual communities has not been resolved. The methods adopted derive much, of course, from the approach developed by Warner and his students in their researches on small towns. Procedures such as participant-observation, analysis of social interaction networks, and analysis of status rankings of all organizations or persons with whom an informant is acquainted can be applied to a sample population. This procedure was substituted for the direct participant-observation used by social scientists who studied small towns.
