US Millennials are most likely to identify as "working class"

New analysis by Ipsos of the General Social Survey, a face-to-face randomly selected survey of Americans, has found that a majority of Millennials (those adults born since 1980 – also known as “Generation Y” in the UK) identify as working class – in 2014 56 per cent of this generation said they belonged in the working class.

The figures for other generations are lower – in the same year 50% of Generation X members (those born 1966-1979) and 44% of Baby Boomers (those born 1945-1965) said they felt that they belonged to the working class.

 

This finding is mirrored in the proportions who consider themselves to be “middle class” – Millennials are the least likely to identify with this category, with 35% saying they belong to the middle class, compared with 40% of Generation X and 44% of Baby Boomers who say the same thing. Since around 2000, there has been a trend of decreasing identification with the middle class amongst all generations bar the oldest (those born before 1945).

 

Technical note

Ipsos re-analysed data from the long-running General Social Survey (GSS) series, which records detailed information about the American population. The survey employs a random selection methodologies, and uses face-to-face interviewing to collect data, and all point in our analysis represent sample sizes of at least 150 responses.