>he's after how they see themselves in terms of being "normal,
>typical" USers who uphold middle class values.
At 1:19 PM -0400 4/16/01, Doug Henwood wrote:
>But even if his picture of "middle-class" suburbia were accurate,
>it's a stretch to call that representative of the way a mythic
>unitary "America" thinks. Suburbanites are less than half the U.S.
>population, and affluent suburbanites of Wolfe's sort are still
>less. Just 1.5% of his sample has an income under $15,000, compared
>with almost 10% of the U.S. population; people with incomes between
>$15,000 and $50,000 are greatly underrepresented, and those with
>incomes over $50,000, well under half the population, are two-thirds
>of his sample. Over three-quarters are married, compared with just
>over half of U.S. adults, and just 1% appear to be gay.
What's Wolfe's justification for over-representing the well-off if the point is going after folks who think of themselves as "normal, typical"? Folks who make, say, $30,000 don't think of themselves as "'normal, typical' USers who uphold middle class values"?
Yoshie