Lower class or working class? Youth self-identification and class labelling in a split-ballot experiment in Catalonia

This article explores how young people classify the social class of their family of origin when confronted with different linguistic formulations of class categories. While scholarship has long examined the structural conditions shaping youth inequality, less attention has been paid to how class is symbolically constructed within survey instruments themselves. Drawing on the Catalan Youth Survey 2022 (n = 3,665; ages 15–34), we use a randomised Split-Ballot experiment to test whether replacing the label ‘lower class’ with ‘working class’ alters subjective identification with the social class of one’s family of origin. The contrast between both versions was substantial. Only 12.3% of young respondents selected ‘lower class’, whereas 41.4% chose ‘working class’. Multivariate models confirmed that wording was the strongest predictor of selecting the lowest category, even after adjusting for gender, age, education, nationality, and parental class. ‘Working class’ also aligned more closely with respondents from objectively working-class households, whereas ‘lower class’ appeared to carry stronger negative connotations, leading many young people, including those from objectively working-class families, to opt for middle-class categories. These findings suggest that class labelling is not a neutral descriptive exercise. The study underscores the importance of examining the linguistic framing of class in youth research.