Studying Socioeconomic Status: Conceptual Problems and an Alternative Path Forward

Abstract

Socioeconomic status (SES; or social class) is considered an important determinant of psychological and life outcomes. Despite this importance, how to appropriately conceive of and measure it remains unsettled. In this article, I argue that SES is, under conventional conceptions of the construct, an unmeasurable construct and present an alternative strategy for studying socioeconomic conditions. I make this argument using several lines of analysis. First, a literature review of 20 years of psychological research on SES reveals that psychologists rarely define SES theoretically (79.6% of articles did not) but call a great number of operationalizations measures of SES (147 in total). Second, current recommendations for studying SES permit contradictory predictions, rendering the recommendations unsatisfactory. Third, the appropriate measurement model for SES inhibits accumulation of results across studies, which makes studying the construct practically impossible. To rectify these issues, I reconceptualize SES as a set of socioeconomic conditions and develop a measurement strategy for studying these conditions. I conclude by considering implications for ongoing research on socioeconomic conditions and for interpreting past research on SES.

Unequal opportunities from the start: Socioeconomic disparities in classroom participation in preschool.

“…In the social sciences, and in psychology in particular, it is typical to use several different indicators (e.g., income, parental occupation) jointly to determine SES (Antonoplis, 2022; Kraus & Stephens, 2012; Oakes & Rossi, 2003). For this study, the only indicator available from French school authorities was parental occupation, which is a reliable proxy for overall SES, especially in France (Croizet & Claire, 1998; Goudeau & Croizet, 2017).…”

Dispositional and situational attributions for why the rich live longer than the poor

“…One explanation is that for subjective ranking to predict redistribution attitudes it must capture a person's view of themselves within the to‐be‐redistributed domain. Although there are indications that respondents sometimes base their responses to the MacArthur question on a wide range of factors, including health and spirituality (Antonoplis, 2022) we view this to be less likely here because we specifically asked participants about their ranking in financial, occupational and education terms. The closest available comparator we measured was participants' view of their self‐rated health.…”

Rethinking scarcity and poverty: Building bridges for shared insight and impact

“…On the other hand, consumption adequacy emphasizes the individualization and time‐bounded nature of resources (Farrell & Hill, 2018). Thus, consumption adequacy incorporates both objective and subjective elements, which aligns with definitions of resource scarcity (Cannon et al, 2019; Hamilton, Mittal, et al, 2019; Hamilton, Thompson, et al, 2019) and recent conceptualizations of SES and consumer wealth (Antonoplis, 2022; Tully & Sharma, 2022).…”