Class and poverty

This chapter uses data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) Survey to validate ESeC in terms of poverty and deprivation in the countries of pre-enlargement Europe. As Goldthorpe (2002a: 213; cf. Goldthorpe and McKnight 2006) observes, the purpose of ESeC, and other social class schemas in the same tradition, is to bring out the constraints and opportunities typical of different class positions particularly as they bear ‘on individuals’ security, stability and prospects as a precondition of constructing explanations of empirical regularities’. A major concern of such class analysis is with the association between class and differential life-chances (Goldthorpe 2002b: 21).