Although social class can be thought of as a continuum – a range of social positions on which
each member of society can be placed – researchers have preferred to divide the continuum into
a small number of specific social classes or strata. Within this framework, the concept of social
class is used to assign individuals or families to a social-class category. Consistent with this practice, social class is defined as the division of members of a society into a hierarchy of distinct
status classes, so that members of each class have relatively the same status and members of all
other classes have either more or less status.
To appreciate more fully the complexity of social class, we will briefly consider several underlying concepts pertinent to this definition.