The 'Affluent Worker' project was undertaken to test empirically the thesis of working class embourgeoisement. The research studied the attitudes and behaviour of high wage earners in three mass or continous flow companies. During 1961-1962, married, male workers from three Luton factories (Vauxhall, Skefco and Laporte) were firstly interviewed at work and then, again, at home with their wives. Additionally, a sample of middle-class white-collar workers from the same companies were interviewed only at home.
The full Affluent Worker data collection (including a set of interviews conducted in Cambridge as a pilot prior to the main Luton study) is held at the National Social Policy and Social Change Archive, part of the Albert Sloman Library Special Collections, based at the University of Essex. The materials are paper based and authorised copies are permitted as copyright is retained by the University of Essex. Consultation is by appointment only. However, a digitised subset of the Luton study interviews, in the form of an MS Access database, is available from the UK Data Archive under SN 4871: Affluent Worker in the Class Structure: a Digitised Sample of the Luton Study, 1961-1962.
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