ABSTRACT
The position of individuals within the upper and lower structures of the socioeconomic hierarchy influences their way of life, their social attitudes and behaviours. In the study of social stratification, how people imagine society to be shaped, or more specifically the distribution of socioeconomic status, is referred to as “images of social stratification (ISS)” or “images of social class”. The former is used in Japanese research, while the latter is often used in international comparative research. ISS can be classified into two types: “composition images”, which comprise the number of social strata and categories respondents imagine, and “distribution images”, which capture the distribution of each social stratum as imagined by respondents. People’s perception of the “shape of society”, i.e. their ISS, is not uniform and can be divided into several types.
