Recently the question has been raised in sociology regarding how far human behavior is structured by individual life styles. It has been suggested that life style typologies are better suited for social structural analysis than models of social classes or social strata. Current research, however, does not link life styles to a micro-level theory of the production of social inequality, and leads to a lack of comparability of the identified typologies.This research project aims at theoretically constructing a typology of life styles and applying it in a quantitative survey to assess its empirical and theoretical explanatory power in different areas of social action.
