Best Practices in Conceptualizing and Measuring Social Class in Psychological Research

Abstract

An extensive body of research has documented the relation between social class, as indexed by socioeconomic status (SES) and subjective social status (SSS), and a host of outcomes, including physical and mental health, academic achievement, and educational attainment. Yet, there remains ambiguity regarding how best to conceptualize and measure social class. This article clarifies definitional and measurement issues related to the assessment of SES and SSS, addresses their importance and relevance for psychological research, and reviews best practices with regard to measurement and assessment. We conclude by discussing the integration of social class with other markers of social position to promote the advancement of psychological science.

A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

“…Social class is predominantly conceptualized as a composition of objective indicators of socioeconomic status (income, education, occupational prestige; [1,3,4,17,62,[69][70][71]), and most studies outside the field of psychology employ at least one of these indicators. But recently and especially inside the field of psychology, research has proposed that social class is not limited to these objective measures of socioeconomic status but instead may also comprise individuals' perception of social standing compared with others in society [1,26,66,69,[72][73][74].…”

“…Second, regarding the measurement of social class, we used a composite measure that comprised the three objective socioeconomic indicators of income, education, and occupational prestige in our analyses (we were restricted to income and educational attainment only in Study 2 and for the year 2012 in the studies using the GSS; see [17,[69][70][71]). By using the same state-of-the-art composite measure in all of our analyses, we minimized the possible dominating effect of any single indicator.…”

Diversity for diversity's sake? The relationship between diversity and school-level academic achievement.

“…However, much controversy exists about how to best operationalize SES (Bornstein & Bradley, 2003;Diemer, Mistry, Wadsworth, Lopez, & Reimers, 2013;Harwell & LeBeau, 2010;Lucas, Beresford, Chapa, & Yun, 2010). It seems as though the best one can do is to justify the metric of SES utilized within the context of a study (Harwell & LeBeau, 2010;Oaks & Rossi, 2003).…”

“…What is contestable is agreement on how to best operationalize SES. A review of all measures of SES, even when restricting measures to those employed in the education literature, is too cumbersome for a comprehensive review in any paper (Diemer et al, 2013;Lucas et al, 2010), the purpose of this study is to investigate the predictive power of one measure of SES, the DI, on academic achievement in a single urban public school district in the Southeastern United States.…”

“…Diemer et al (2013), Harwell and LeBeau (2010), Lucas et al (2010), Oaks and Rossi (2003), and Sirin (2005) caution that the component factors chosen for inclusion in an SES metric should be carefully considered within the context of its application. Resource-based measures of SES commonly include measures of income or wealth (Burnett & Farkas, 2009;Engle & Black, 2008) or level of parent educational attainment (Eshelman & Rottinghaus, 2015) and the number of variables used to capture these measures is vast (Deimer et al, 2013).…”