It was based on a reclassification and ranking of the then-current official census classification, the Classification and Classified List of Occupations (CCLO). This system was adapted from, and adhered to the principles incorporated in, the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) issued by the International Labour Office in 1958. It was revised for use in the 1966, 1971, 1976, and 1981 censuses of Australia, after which it was superseded by the first edition of the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations (ASCO).

The 1961 CCLO consisted of 348 occupational categories grouped in 73 minor and 12 major groups. Because the latter aggregations tend to reflect industrial rather than skill differences, they are of limited use for sociological analysis. Accordingly, the research group responsible for the 1965 survey (Leonard Broom, Frank Jones and Jerzy Zubrzycki) regrouped the 348 basic building blocks into 100 categories, which they further collapsed into sixteen ranked social strata:

1. Upper Professionals; 2. Graziers, wheat & sheep farmers; 3. Lower Professionals; 4. Managerial workers; 5. Self-employed shop proprietors; 6. Other farmers; 7. Clerical workers; 8. Armed services & police; 9. Craftsmen & foremen; 10. Shop assistants; 11. Operative & process workers; 12. Drivers; 13. Service workers; 14. Miners; 15. Farm workers; 16. Labourers

Fuller accounts of this nominal scale can be found in the following publications.

L. Broom, F.L. Jones, and Jerzy Zubrzycki, 1965, "An occupational classification of the Australian workforce", Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 1 (October 1965): supplement.

L. Broom and F.L. Jones (with the collaboration of Jerzy Zubrzycki), 1976, Opportunity and Attainment in Australia. Canberra: ANU Press.

CCLO and the ANU2 Scale

The ANU1 scale, as it came to be called, was superseded in the 1970s by the ANU2 scale, developed for use in the analysis of a second, and more ambitious, survey of social stratification in Australia. Unlike the ANU1 scale, ANU2 has a formal and explicit derivation based on the empirical linkages between opinions about the relative social standing of different occupations and the demographic, social and economic characteristics of their incumbents.

An extended account of how this scale was constructed can be found in Volume 6, Number 3 (September 1977) of Social Science Research, pp. 211-224 ("The Social Standing of Jobs: Scores for All Australian Occupations", by L. Broom, P. Duncan-Jones, F.L. Jones and P. McDonnell), and in the references cited in that publication.

The ANU2 scale provides socioeconomic scores for all 348 occupational categories in the CCLO. Scores were recalibrated to have a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100. The actual scores range from a low of 331 (labourers in food and drink processing) to a high of 915 (self-employed medical practitioners). Where feasible, scale scores were calculated separately for workers in the same category but different employment relations (employers plus self-employed versus wage and salary earners plus unpaid helpers). Across a comparable list of occupational categories, ANU2 correlates moderately well (+0.83) with the 16-category version of ANU1. ANU2 has better construct validity than the earlier scale.

ASCO (1st Edition) and the ANU3 Scale

The ANU3 scale is an updated version of ANU2 suitable for use with the census occupational classification introduced in processing the results of the 1986 census of Australia, the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations (ASCO). The construction of this scale is described by F.L. Jones in "Occupational Prestige in Australia: a New Scale", pp. 187-199 in Volume 25, No. 2 (August 1989) of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology.

The first part of this paper reports an individual-level analysis designed to give users a fuller understanding of the structural features of the ANU2 scale (especially the impact of income, a variable not available from the census when the ANU2 scale was constructed). The development of the ANU3 scale is reported in the second part of the paper, using an aggregate-level analysis based on 161 ASCO groups for which occupational prestige ratings were available or could be estimated (for details, see page 194 of the 1989 paper). Although the prestige ratings are for the most part the same as those used to construct the ANU2 scale, the data on worker characteristics are more recent (they come from the 1986 census whereas 1971 census data were used for ANU2). A regression equation linking aggregate worker characteristics to prestige ratings was used to estimate socioeconomic status scores for all ASCO groups. Scores were scaled to range from 0 (low status) to 100 (high status).

ASCO (2nd Edition), the ANU3_2 Scale, & Beyond

With the release of ASCO 2nd Edition for use in processing the results of the 1996 Census, a revised version of ANU3 was published (Julie McMillan and F.L. Jones, "The ANU3_2 Scale: a Revised Occupational Scale for Australia", pp. 64-80 in The Journal of Sociology, Volume 36, No. 1 (March 2000)). This revision does not incorporate any new information but simply adapts the 1989 version of this scale for use with the revised version of ASCO. These same authors are currently developing a set of new scales: ANU4 (a socioeconomic status scale based on linkages between education, occupation and market income); CAMSISOZ (an interaction scale based on patterns of occupational homogamy); and a class scheme based on the principles underlying the new British system of social classification (D. Rose and K. O'Reilly, Constructing Classes: Towards a New Social Classification for the UK, 1997, Swindon: Economic and Social Research Council and the Office for National Statistics).

NB: The individual links on the previous page provide details on how to convert different census classifications to successive versions of the ANU scales.