Anthony Hoskin Publishes Book

Anthony Hoskin, an associate professor in Idaho State University’s
Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminology, recently published a book alongside
colleagues from The University of Malaya that attempts to summarize everything that has been
linked to social status.
“The Handbook of Social Status Correlates” reports associations between various
measures of social status including parental income, years of education, occupational level,
income/wealth, leadership/eminence and social mobility and various outcomes including family
and peers, personality and behavior, attitudes, beliefs and more.
“My colleagues and I wanted to understand what the world social science literature had to
say about the importance of social status,” Hoskin said. “A single study from one country during
one time period can say almost anything, but the picture that emerges from 8,000 studies is much
more reliable.”
Hoskin and his colleagues spent several years writing the book, as collecting, organizing
and synthesizing the results of 8,000 studies was a large project. Hoskin said they tracked down
and read the studies, then extracted the main findings and summarized them into relevant tables.
After the hundreds of tables were completed, they summarized them into narrative form and
discussed the important review studies. Next, they determined which findings were considered
universal and last, they hinted at the kind of theory of social status that would conform to the
global picture.
Hoskin worked with Lee Ellis, a former professor at the University of Malaya, and Malini
Ratnasigam, a professor at the University of Malaya, on the book. Hoskin said he and his
colleagues hope that the book will inform theory and reinforces the message that social status
matters and is tied to just about all of the life conditions we care about.
Hoskin said the book was designed as a global authority on the study of social status.
Students and scholars can now access one source to get a comprehensive overview of social
status research.