1. Education of Head: The scoring is only for the education of the Head of family, irrespective of whether he/she was the subject or not.

2. Credit for completed milestone only: The level of education to be considered should be the maximum level already attained, not the one currently undergoing and not yet completed. For example, a person currently in the second year of a college degree course (of three years duration), has not completed the graduation yet. So the allotted score for education should be 5 (‘higher secondary certificate’) only.

3. Renaming of categories: The education scenario has changed since the time of the original scale. So, there is a need for recommending few changes, than just clarifying the existing categories. By and large, the concept of ‘intermediate’ after high school, has been replaced by ‘higher secondary’, that is class XII (R).

4. ‘High grade’ professional degree: The original scale mentions that the top most category of education comprises of post-graduation as well as some courses that are actually graduation but qualify to be the top most category if they are ‘high grade’ professional degrees. The scale mentions few examples of such courses but does not define. This revision recommends that the following professional courses be included in the topmost category and scored as 7: Engineering, Medical, Dental, Architecture, and Chartered Accountancy (R).

5. Expanded definition of illiterate: The current categorization includes all persons less than 7 years of age as ‘illiterate’. As per the Census of India definition too, such persons are treated as illiterate, irrespective of their actual capacity to read and write [4]. The current definition has to be the expanded one, to take into account the rare possibility of families where Head may be less than 7 years of age. A hypothetical example can be of two siblings, both less than 7 years of age, left orphaned due to sudden unfortunate loss of their parents. Till the time of their legal adoption by a relative or others, they would constitute an ‘Electron family’[5]. For this family, the eldest sibling would be the de-facto ‘head’ and education thus need to be scored.

1. Occupation of Head: Remember that the scoring is only for the occupation of the Head of family.

2. Retired Head: In case the Head of family is currently retired, credit may be given while scoring for his/her last job held (R).

3. How to score: While scoring an individual, move up the categories from 1 to 10 score (that is from ‘unemployed’ upwards till ‘professional’). Moving up, decide the maximum category to place the individual at and so the score that can be allotted.

4. Independent scoring: The scoring of the Occupation is independent of the scoring in the Education category. Consider two hypothetical cases as examples – Case (a) A lawyer who has never been employed ever, after attaining his/her professional degree. There can be several reasons for such a situation. The scoring for occupation should be 1 (for ‘unemployed’). Case (b) An architect by education, who is not pursuing the profession fulltime or part time. (S) he has now opened a cyber cafe shop and is occupied in running this shop. The scoring should be for the third category of ‘Arithmetic skill jobs’ as per the actual status.

5. Name of third category: This has been a source of some confusion. The original scale simply names this category as ‘Clerical, Shop owner, Farm owner etc.’ that are just examples of the category. It is explained in the original scale as jobs that require some training in arithmetic and probably also reading and writing. This revision recommends that this category be named as ‘Arithmetic skill jobs’. The term ‘arithmetic skill’ is used here in context of need of arithmetic skills in the job (as given in the original scale) (R).

6. Shopkeeper classification: Many of the people are likely to have this occupation, and the size of the shop can also vary from a petty kiosk to a large popular store. It bears noting that ‘shop keeper’ is actually being classified into two, with ‘petty shopkeeper’- that is a small-time shopkeeper running only a small shop, being classified lower as a ‘semi-skilled worker’.

7. Ranking the prestige of an occupation: As mentioned in the original scale, if a person shows greater initiative than routine expected of his/her job, he/she can be placed in a higher category of occupation.

Table II describes the Occupation categories for clarification purpose. Note that just eliciting the profession or designation of the head of the family may not be enough, but details of the person’s actual occupation are required in many occasions.

1. Family income, not per capita income: It should be noted that the income to be assessed is total family income (per month) and not the per capita income. This point has been clarified earlier [3].

2. Real-time update: The income categories to be used for the scale can be determined using the interactive online calculator provided at www.scaleupdate. weebly.com .

3. CPI-IW value to use: The current or latest value of CPI-IW may not be the one required always. For most cross-sectional studies where an individual would be assessed for SES only once, it would be the latest value available before the data collection. The cut-off point can be considered as the printing of study question-naires (or final freezing of study tool version, in case of electronic data collection tools). For prospective studies, where an individual is to be assessed at least six months apart, different CPI-IW values can be used for real-time update as applicable (R).