What does it take to be rich? Asking reasonable survey questions about income inequality

Abstract

Measuring public perceptions of economic inequality is challenging. Even though the concept of unequal resources is intuitive, most mathematical summaries of inequality are not. Additionally, humans are better at thinking in terms of prototypical representations of different groups than in terms of statistical properties of distributions. As a result, asking respondents to estimate numeric indicators of unequal distributions results in high rates of missing and ad hoc responses. To circumvent this problem, this article proposes and characterizes two survey items about income differences that refer primarily to mental representations of social groups but that can still be used to explore respondents’ perceptions of economic inequality. The survey items ask respondents to estimate the income at which a household becomes rich and the income at which a household becomes poor. Three survey samples from two countries show that response patterns are plausible and exhibit expected correlates. These items sacrifice the existence of objectively correct numeric answers but gain insight into respondents’ subjective perceptions of the differences between the rich and the poor. Consequently, these items may improve our ability to study the correlates and determinants of lay perceptions of economic inequality.