A Study Of The Stratum Identification Of Urban Underclass

With the deepening of economic reform and development of industrialization and urbanization, social structure in China has taken great changes. As a result, the disparities between stratums become more and more obvious and stratum consciousness grows stronger and stronger. Meanwhile, the mass incidents, of which underclass are subjects mainly, come out more and more. Therefore, it’s very important to understand stratum identification of urban underclass and its determinants, which is helpful for social management. Thus, the research on it is necessary and of great realistic significance.Methods of structure interview and face to face questionnaires are adopted by researching in Nanjing, Suzhou, Nantong and Huaian of Jiangsu province, from which answering the questions including what stratum identification of urban underclass is and what its determinants are. Thus, the research starts from analysing stratification perception, and then to stratum identification, from which the current situation of stratum identification of urban underclass was shown. Based on the above, economic underclass was chosen to be the object in the analysis of stratum identification determinants, for which data collected in three cites in Jiangsu province were evidence. The structure of this study is following: Firstly, clarify the concept of underclass and classify as economic underclass and deviant underclass according to the characteristic. At the same time, the researches on urban underclass were found to be absent after reviewing relative studies. Therefore, the questions answered by this paper were raised, as well as method and data source. In the second chapter, the analysis began from stratification perception of urban underclass, and then to their standard and classification of stratification and their own stratum identification. On this basis, the discussion about ’inside’ and ’outside’ between economic and deviant underclass were started, in order to find their attitudes to the others and test whether subgroup consciousness existed.In the third chapter, economic underclass was chosen to be questionnaire objects to find stratum identification determinants. According to the analysis of questionnaire data from Suzhou, Nantong and Huaian, several variables including objective social status, offspring support, psychological factors, social attitudes and behaviours and population variables, were tested. Based on the result, Logistic Regression Equation was developed.In the final chapter, summary and discussions were made. The basic conclusions of this thesis are that the stratum cognitions of urban underclass were both clear and ambiguous, meanwhile the stratum identification of them was mostly obvious but not strong. Besides, psychological factors containing being discriminated and life satisfaction, and regional disparity had significant effects, while objective social status didn’t.