Field of education

CECT Field scores: Human-Centeredness in Education

**UNDER CONSTRUCTION**

Education is one of the most widely used variables in public opinion and political behavior research. Most studies measure how much education a person has. CECT Field scores measures something different: what kind of education a person receives.

Field of education captures the substantive content of education. A degree in engineering, economics, history, education, medicine, or the arts exposes students to different concepts, skills, and ways of understanding human behavior and social outcomes. The CECT field scores provide a continuous measure of this variation across fields of study.

CECT stands for Cultural, Economic, Communicative, and Technical skills. The score measures the human-centeredness of a field: the extent to which cultural and communicative skills predominate over economic and technical skills. Low scores indicate fields that are more technical, material, or instrumental in orientation. High scores indicate fields that place greater emphasis on human behavior, social context, communication, interpretation, and culture.

This website releases CECT field scores for specific fields of study and provides crosswalks to several major surveys. The scores are intended for researchers who want to incorporate field of education into analyses of public opinion, political attitudes, social stratification, political behavior, or related outcomes.

How were scores constructed?

The measure builds on research on field-related educational resources by Dutch sociologists using survey data from the late 1990s. They asked respondents to assess the extent to which their education exposed them to sixteen skills, with responses averaged across eleven fields of study. The sixteen skills are grouped into four dimensions: cultural, economic, communicative, and technical.

In 2024, our team updated and extended this approach using original surveys in the United States and the Netherlands. We used the same 16-skill schema but expanded the field classification to 80 fields of study. Reliability checks show that the four skill dimensions are measured consistently. We then use these skill profiles to calculate a human-centeredness score for each field and crosswalk these scores to major surveys that include information on respondents’ field of education.

Download the data

The files below provide field-of-education scores and survey-specific crosswalks. Each dataset includes a codebook with field labels, source categories, CECT scores, and notes on construction.

Which file should I use?

For research in the United States, we suggest using the US field scores or the GSS crosswalk. For contemporary European surveys, the Dutch field scores are often the most natural starting point, though researchers may wish to check robustness using the US scores. For the European Social Survey 2004–2008 or European surveys before 2010, use the ESS crosswalk based on the earlier Dutch field-score schema.

How to cite? 

Main citation for the CECT field scores data: 
Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Jonne Kamphorst, and Julia Schulte-Cloos. 2026. “Field of Education and Political Attitudes: The Power and Limits of Field Theory.” Perspectives on Politics. Supplementary material || Replication data on Harvard Dataverse.

Documentation

For more info on the measure and how to crosswalk: Background documentation

Further reading:

• Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks. 2022. The social roots of the transnational cleavage: Education, occupation, and sex. Florence: European University Institute, RSC Working Paper 2022/57 || Online Appendix.

This paper situates the educational cleavage against the backdrop of the information revolution. It argues that field of education is as influential as level of education in conditioning a person’s partisanship on the contemporary cleavage, and extends the relevance of field from education to occupation.

• Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Jonne Kamphorst. 2025. Field of education and political behavior: Predicting GAL/TAN voting. American Political Science Review  119(2): 794-811. Online Appendix|| Harvard Dataverse

This paper argues that field of education has an independent role to play over and above level, and demonstrates a socialization effect. It introduces how we operationalize CECT field scores, and crosswalks the early Dutch data (1998) to the European Social Survey (2004-2008) and to German SOEP panel data.

• Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Jonne Kamphorst, Julia-Schulte-Cloos. 2026. Field of Education and Political Attitudes: The Power and Limits of Field Theory. Perspectives on Politics (in print). Online Appendix.

This article introduces contemporary field scores from original surveys conducted by the authors in the US and the Netherlands in 2024, and crosswalks these to the General Social Survey (2012-2022) and a YouGov survey in 15 European countries (2023).

• Jonne Kamphorst, Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Ye Wang. 2026. The Gender Gap on the Socio-Cultural Cleavage. SSRN 6802344.

This paper examines the role of field of education in the contemporary gender gap in voting. It uses the ESS crosswalk and the 2024 crosswalks to German SOEP and Dutch LISS. The paper is under revision but you can download a working paper version on SSRN.

Contact and funding

Contact: Liesbet Hooghe, EUI (liesbet.hooghe@eui.eu) / UNC-Chapel Hill (hooghe@unc.edu)
Funding: Advanced ERC grant Transnational #885026 hosted by the European University Institute in Florence;  W.R. Kenan and Burton Craige Research Foundations hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.