The purpose of this study is to investigate longitudinal changes in the association between people’s images of social stratification (ISS) and their social status in Japan. ISS are defined as people’s perceptions of how social stratification is distributed. Existing studies on ISS have discussed how ISS are influenced by people’s reference groups and the socioeconomic situation of their society. Meanwhile, the latest study on the ‘quiet transformation of status identification’ suggested that Japanese people came to have a more realistic view of their own social status and social structure from the 1980s to the 2010s, and that this change was the key mechanism of the transformation. Combining these arguments, I expect to find that the influence of reference groups on ISS weakened from the 1980s to the 2010s. Analyzing representative national survey datasets from 1985 and 2015, I indeed find that the influence of status identification (a proxy of reference groups) on ISS decreased in 2015. This suggests that the mechanism of the ‘quiet transformation’ could be applied in explaining how ISS change over time.

中文翻译：

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日本社会分层的变化形象：“安静转型”的另一面

本研究的目的是调查日本人的社会分层 (ISS) 形象与其社会地位之间关联的纵向变化。ISS 被定义为人们对社会分层如何分布的看法。现有关于 ISS 的研究讨论了 ISS 如何受到人们的参考群体及其社会的社会经济状况的影响。同时，最新关于“身份认同的悄然转变”的研究表明，从 80 年代到 2010 年代，日本人对自己的社会地位和社会结构有了更现实的认识，而这种变化是其关键机制。转型。结合这些论点，我预计会发现参考群体对国际空间站的影响从 1980 年代到 2010 年代减弱了。