Sinus-Milieus

EN Texto en inglés Aún no hay artículo en tu idioma: extracto en inglés.

The Sinus-Milieus are a model of social stratification and lifestyle-based target-group segmentation developed and marketed by the Heidelberg-based Sinus-Institut. The model places a population in a two-dimensional space along social position (vertical) and basic value orientation (horizontal), then clusters people of similar values and ways of life into "milieus". The approach was first published in 1981. It is used today in market and media research, brand and product development, political campaigning, public-policy planning and academic sociology in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with adapted Sinus Meta-Milieus versions for more than 40 other countries. The German model currently contains ten milieus. Its standard visualisation, coloured ovals overlapping on the social-position-by-values plane, is widely known in German as the Kartoffelgrafik ("potato graph") after a 2009 feature in Stern. The Sinus-Milieus have shaped German empirical social science, especially the milieu-based work of Stefan Hradil, Gerhard Schulze and Michael Vester, and they are built into the main German-language market-media studies and audience-measurement panels. They have also drawn academic criticism on grounds of proprietary methodology, opacity and a focus on subjective lifestyle indicators at the expense of structural inequality.