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 defi ned 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