ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors assume that social status, life-cycle and a measure of gregariousness might be meaningfully related to opinion leadership. In the realm of fashions, first of all, the authors introduced the notion of an “export” index to measure, inferentially, the extent to which opinion leaders serve their own groups compared with the extent to which they influence members of other social groupings. Fashion leadership is strongly related to life-cycle type and gregariousness and somewhat less to social status, while leadership in public affairs is related primarily to social status and to gregariousness but to a much lesser extent to the life-cycle. Fashion leaders are concentrated among young women, and among young women of high gregariousness. The marketing leaders are married women with comparatively large families. In the arena of movie-going, the concentration of leadership is among the girls, just as it is in the case of fashion.
