Class Disparities Research Articles

Gendering the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Or how organizing an official football team became a strategy of “passive revolution”

AbstractThe ongoing debate in organization and management studies regarding the transformation of oligarchic structures through rank‐and‐file participation often overlooks gender dynamics. Drawing from the experience of Argentine women playing football independently, this article argues that promoting gender inequalities and reinforcing masculine stereotypes can preserve class disparities in trade unions. Additionally, it highlights how trade unions, by extending control into women's leisure, can perpetuate oligarchic structures, emphasizing the importance of politicizing leisure as a domain of gender inequalities. In turn, the patriarchal‐oligarchic organization represents a unique form of class and gender domination that reconfigures itself by co‐opting informal solidarity networks.

Who feels they contribute to U.S. society? Helping behaviors and social class disparities in perceived contributions.

Americans in lower (vs. higher) social class contexts are less likely to believe they contribute to society. Helping others by giving one's time is an important way of contributing to others that also varies with social class. Five studies (N = 7,326) investigated whether one source of the social class disparity in perceived contributions is a default model that considers helping distant others (i.e., bridging help, e.g., volunteering) as more of a contribution than helping close others (i.e., bonding help, e.g., caring for family members). In Study 1, Americans in lower (vs. higher) social class contexts perceived they contribute less to society (i.e., self-perceived contributions, Part A) and believed others perceive them as contributing less (i.e., metaperceived contributions, Part B). Studies 2-4 provide evidence for a default model of social good: Americans across social class contexts and even helpers themselves perceived bridging help as more of a contribution than bonding help, in part, because bridging help is perceived as reflecting more choice to help. With a representative sample (Midlife Development in the United States), Study 5 finds that Americans in lower (vs. higher) social class contexts engaged in relatively less bridging help and more bonding help. However, bridging help served as a stronger pathway to feelings of contributing than bonding help did. Together, these studies suggest that people in lower social class contexts may experience a psychological inequality, in part, because some of the forms of help that are most accessible, familiar, and practiced are widely perceived as less of a contribution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

MRI-Based Brain Tumour Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

This research assessed advancements in brain tumour classification using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and MRI data. An analysis of 37 studies highlighted the effectiveness of CNN architectures and pre-processing methods in accurately categorising brain tumours. Issues such as class disparities and model interpretability were identified, prompting recommendations for advanced deep learning techniques, ensemble methods, and diverse datasets to enhance diagnostic accuracy. The findings underscored the importance of these methods in achieving high accuracy, with a maximum rate of 98.80% from 154 MRI images. This systematic study also included a meta-analysis from 2018 to 2022, revealing patterns in MRI cases across demographics and providing insights into healthcare trends.

Gentrification creates social class disparities in belonging.

Gentrification impacts nearly every major city in the United States, posing a potential threat to lower social class residents' sense of belonging in their neighborhoods. In one survey and three preregistered experiments, we investigated how gentrification affects the belonging of residents across the social class spectrum and how to invest in working-class neighborhoods without undermining lower social class residents' sense of belonging. Studies 1-3 (Ns = 141, 1,085, and 510, respectively) provided correlational and experimental evidence that lower social class residents feel less belonging than higher social class residents in gentrifying neighborhoods. Study 3 showed that this belonging disparity was mediated by lower social class individuals perceiving themselves to be less similar to and less trusting of other residents and higher social class individuals feeling the amenities would better suit them in the gentrifying neighborhood. Nevertheless, neighborhood investment does not always threaten lower social class individuals' sense of belonging. Study 4 (N = 402) showed that lower social class individuals anticipated greater belonging and were more supportive when neighborhood investment was community driven (i.e., prioritized the needs of existing residents) than capital driven (i.e., prioritized economic growth). We discuss implications for equitable urban policy and future directions for a social psychology of gentrification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Gentrification Creates Social Class Disparities in Belonging

Supplemental Material for Gentrification Creates Social Class Disparities in Belonging

The Multiple Dimensions of Space: Spatial Narrative Types and Socio-Cultural Mapping in New Century Chinese Novels

This study explores how spatial narratives in new-century Chinese novels reflect and engage with China's rapidly changing socio-cultural landscape. Since the mid-1990s, China's accelerated marketization and globalization have profoundly altered traditional lifestyles and public aesthetics, significantly influencing literary creation. How do contemporary Chinese novelists employ spatial narratives to represent these changes, and what insights do these narratives offer into modern Chinese society? Employing textual analysis grounded in Lefebvre's spatial theory and Soja's Thirdspace concept, this paper examines the manifestations and functions of physical, psychological, and social spaces in new-century Chinese novels. Findings reveal diverse and complex spatial narratives: fragmented physical spaces reflecting globalization's impact, psychological spaces highlighting identity recognition anxiety, and social spaces exposing modern society's alienation and class disparities. This study contributes to a deeper application of spatial narrative theory in Chinese literary research, offering new analytical tools for understanding modern literature and its reflection of social changes. It provides insights into the characteristics and trends of new-century Chinese social culture, promoting further research and theoretical development in related fields.

Supplemental Material for Who Feels They Contribute to U.S. Society? Helping Behaviors and Social Class Disparities in Perceived Contributions

Supplemental Material for Who Feels They Contribute to U.S. Society? Helping Behaviors and Social Class Disparities in Perceived Contributions

Capitalism, Education and Social Mobility: Critical Approach Based on Scientific Literature

Education is a key factor for human development and social progress. However, in the context of capitalism, education is also influenced by economic inequalities and power structures. Scientific information selected through a critical review has identified the main theories and findings regarding education conceived within the capitalist model and inherent social mobility. The results demonstrate that in more egalitarian states, wage increases associated with education vary only slightly based on socioeconomic status. However, significant class disparities exist in states with moderate to high levels of inequality. While some argue that education can be a tool for upward mobility, others emphasize how capitalism and pre-existing inequalities can limit such mobility. Understanding this relationship is crucial for addressing issues of equity and social justice in capitalist societies.

What causes social class disparities in education? The role of the mismatches between academic contexts and working-class socialization contexts and how the effects of these mismatches are explained.

Within psychology, the underachievement of students from working-class backgrounds has often been explained as a product of individual characteristics such as a lack of intelligence or motivation. Here, we propose an integrated model illustrating how educational contexts contribute to social class disparities in education over and beyond individual characteristics. According to this new Social Class-Academic Contexts Mismatch model, social class disparities in education are due to several mismatches between the experiences that students from working-class backgrounds bring with them to the classroom and those valued in academic contexts-specifically, mismatches between (a) academic contexts' culture of independence and the working-class orientation to interdependence, (b) academic contexts' culture of competition and the working-class orientation toward cooperation, (c) the knowledge valued in academic contexts and the knowledge developed through working-class socialization, and (d) the social identities valued in academic contexts and the negatively stereotyped social identities of students from working-class backgrounds. Because of these mismatches, students from working-class backgrounds are likely to experience discomfort and difficulty in the classroom. We further propose that, when attempting to make sense of these first-order effects, students and teachers rely on inherent characteristics (e.g., ability, motivation) more often than warranted; conversely, they overlook extrinsic, contextual factors. In turn, this explanatory bias toward inherent features leads (a) students from working-class backgrounds to experience self-threat and (b) their teachers to treat them unfairly. These second-order effects magnify social class disparities in education. This integrated model has the potential to reshape research and discourse on social class and education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Dynamics of Gender and Health in Bama’s Sangati and Kadeeja Mumtas’ Barsa

Gender and health are two separate disciplines having a strong connection with each other. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), gender is a core social determinant of health and health inequalities. These health inequalities are associated with the lifestyle, accessibility and care provided to men and women. In most Indian societies, women are perceived as child-bearers, caregivers having no say in the communities they live in. Moreover they have been shoved into margins and an indifferent attitude is formed for them. From the viewpoint of gender, class or ethnic disparities women in India face a multitude of health and hygiene problems. This marginalization causes inequitable access to essential human needs such as water, proper health and sanitary facilities. Consequently women have poorer health than men. Another form in which women are suppressed and oppressed are sexual harassment, violence, physical abuse, occupational and environmental hazards due to which they not only suffer from physiological problems but it also affects their mental health like psychological stress and strain. These health issues deteriorate their well- being. Due to casteism prevalent in our society the so- called power holders exploit Dalit women treating them as lower than humans and ‘other’. Bama’s Sangati is a look at the part of the lives of those Paraiya women. Kadeeja Mumtas’ novel Barsa is a commentary on the position of women in Muslim society focusing on the illegal practices like circumcision. This paper aims to examine the issues which the Tamil Christian Dalit women and Muslim women face in terms of health and sexuality as discussed in Bama’s Sangati and Kadeeja Mumtas’ Barsa through depicting a critique of several generations of women.

Enhancing Oral Health Care Access for School Children: A Perspective.

Inadequate access to oral health services for school children remains a pervasive issue in Nigeria. According to a study, a mere 20% of enrolled students have availed themselves of dental visits following referrals from dentists. Various barriers, such as geographical location, socioeconomic status, lack of awareness about the importance of oral health, and fear of treatment, contribute to this low utilization rate. The resulting problem exacerbates social class disparities within the country. To address this pressing concern, we conducted an exhaustive academic review encompassing peer-reviewed literature, policy documents, and other relevant materials. This review underscored three potential policy alternatives: bolstering educational campaigns on oral health, implementing mobile dental clinics, and establishing on-site school-based dental clinics—an innovative approach in the Nigerian context. Additionally, we will delve into insights from a successful case study of a model on-site school oral healthcare clinic in Ile-Ife. Recognizing that each approach comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, we propose a concise School Oral Health Policy. This policy aims to establish a framework for incorporating these remedies efficiently, providing a comprehensive solution to the issue of insufficient availability of dental healthcare services among Nigerian school pupils.

Forge, Farce or Force: A Study of Cultural Capital and Identity Capital in Pakistani Novels

The aim of this research is to explore cultural capital and identity capital as portrayed in the novels– A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Exit West, Red Birds and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Although these works are written with different themes in mind, there is an overarching semblance that persists in Pakistani literature regarding the dismemberment of cultural capital and identity capital that occurs through the forces of war, displacement and class disparities. This study hopes to capture and expound on those themes in order to understand how cultural capital and identity capital can lead to the fomentation of identities in fractured societies.

Ireland’s Haunted Stages

In this essay I will look at the metaphor of the ghost particularly in relation to the issue of class disparity which has haunted Ireland and its stages for decades and is especially poignant in the current economic situation. Taking my cue from Marvin Carlson’s seminal book The Haunted Stage, I extend his argument that for audiences “ghosting presents the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context” (7), to the recurrence of class disparity and concomitant social injustice in Ireland as represented in Irish theatre across the twentieth century and on into the contemporary moment. The ghosts that haunt Ireland’s stages re-materialize in the themes, characters and performance accretions of plays in successive decades since 1949. These ghosts are the shades of people whose lives were blighted by injustices perpetrated not by a foreign colonial power, but by domestic class structures that served the interests of a narrow elite at the expense of the broader public.

Modified wild Horse Herd Optimization based Bhattacharyya error constraint (BEC) based L2-norm Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method for the sentiment analysis

People's opinions are analyzed via sentiment analysis in all fields. Reviews and tweets, among other formats, are used to express opinions. Irony, sarcasm, and other difficult-to-discern hidden meanings can occasionally be found in viewpoints. Artificial intelligence must be used to examine the sentiments as a result. We suggest a unique Bhattacharyya error constraint (BEC) based L2-norm linear discriminant analysis (LDA) because some of the earlier efforts lack optimization. There are some overfitting and class disparity issues in this. To address this, we used a brand-new method called Modified Wild Horse Herd Optimization (MHHO). The experiment is run to evaluate the performance of the suggested strategy and to compare it to other approaches already in use. We have used performance measures for comparison, and the results demonstrate that the suggested method successfully assesses the sentiment from the acquired dataset.

Enhancing Skin Disease Classification: A Novel Approach With Tailored Loss Functions And SMOTE Sumeet Ghumare

Although skin disease like skin cancer is a common health problem worldwide, early identification is crucial to its recovery. By using medical photos, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the detection of skin diseases. Despite the reality that various deep learning models have been created with this goal in mind, class imbalance in multi class classification all poses a serious difficulty and imbalance among the classes. This work offers a novel strategy to reduce class imbalance in the categorization of skin diseases, leading to significant accuracy gains. One of the largest skin cancer datasets currently accessible, it consists of 33,106 dermoscopy photos from seven different kinds of skin diseases as a starting point. The main goal is to enhance skin disease classification algorithms’ performance on this imbalance dataset. We are going to use a two-pronged strategy to combat the class disparity and GAN (Generative adversarial network) Based Oversampling or Meta-learning in order to successfully equalize the representation of each class during training, we first design a balanced Dynamic Mini-Batch Size logic, SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) and Augmenter. Second, we provide a new loss function designed to take into account the unique features of the dataset. The outcomes are startling. These findings underscore the efficacy of our hybrid approach in training deep convolutional neural networks for imbalanced skin disease datasets. By combining data-level balancing techniques with a carefully designed loss function at the algorithm level, we address the challenge of among the classes, paving the way for more accurate and reliable skin cancer diagnoses. Key Words: Dermoscopy images, DenseNet169, Convolution neural network, SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique, GAN(Generative adversarial network), Mini-Batch Logic, Augmenter

Bad manors: Bergerac as anti-heritage polemic

The BBC’s Bergerac (1981–91) premiered less than a week after ITV’s Brideshead Revisited, which codified the core elements of heritage productions. Heritage and preservation were subjects of contentious cultural and political debate during Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister, which largely coincided with Bergerac’s run. While its case-of-the-week stories offer little generic innovation for the police procedural, Bergerac’s content and visual style anticipate the backlash to 1980s–90s heritage productions that emerges near the end of the decade. Jersey’s history, Offshore Financial Center status and its idiosyncratic relationship to the United Kingdom make it ideal for exploring intense scepticism towards unfettered capitalism, the privileges of wealth and the need for a more inclusive definition of heritage, one that accounts for people of economically marginalized status, which, on Jersey, tends to be anyone who is not a millionaire. Practically every episode of Bergerac concentrates on wealthy lifestyles, class disparity and action located at stately country houses. The goal, though, is not to romanticize them, but to critique them through its disapproving protagonist, Detective Sergeant Jim Bergerac. Bergerac operates as a polemic against wealth, consumption and Thatcherism. In doing so, it consistently advocates for a less exclusive definition of ‘heritage’ that challenges the one associated with Thatcher, lavish television adaptations, like Brideshead, and Merchant-Ivory’s films.

Interdependent behavior only benefits employees from working-class backgrounds when it is both enacted and valued.

Social class disparities are pervasive in American society. In higher education, one critical driver of these disparities is the cultural mismatch between the interdependent norms of people from working-class backgrounds and the independent norms that pervade higher education. However, after graduating from college and entering white-collar workplaces, people from working-class backgrounds have frequent opportunities to collaborate in teams-that is, to enact interdependent behavior. Do these opportunities reduce cultural mismatch for people from working-class backgrounds? Across two survey studies and two experiments with college-educated U.S. employees (total N = 2,566), we find that they do not. We theorize and document that this is because there is often a decoupling between enacting interdependent behavior and whether such behavior is valued as part of being a "good" employee. We find that employees from working-class backgrounds only experience a cultural match and its benefits (e.g., sense of fit, high retention intentions) when interdependent behaviors are both enacted and valued. In contrast, when interdependent behaviors are enacted but not valued, employees from working-class backgrounds experience a cultural mismatch. Furthermore, we find that this pattern is unique to employees from working-class backgrounds: Employees from middle-class backgrounds report similar fit and retention regardless of whether there is a coupling of enacted and valued interdependent behavior. Taken together, our results suggest that it is critical to examine multiple elements of culture simultaneously (e.g., both enacted and valued behavior) to fully understand and predict the consequences of cultural (mis)match. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The mobile spatialization of agriculture in Hong Kong

This paper examines the multi-actor making of the ruralscape in Hong Kong. I critically adopt the theoretical framework of Ingold's concepts of walking to understand how different “wayfarers”, including but not limited to farmers, residents, land activists, agriculture learners, researchers, journalists, leisure practitioners and government officials, walk to make a multi-sensorial landscape. This paper encapsulates the observation outcomes of multiple times of walking by different individuals and groups recorded during my ethnographic fieldwork between 2008 and 2021. I shed light on the local practices and perspectives of hang cyun (walking in villages) and hang tin (walking in fields) to illustrate my observations. By analyzing the wayfarers' walking experiences and embodied movements, I consider the ruralscape as a vibrant space where people configure its meanings and materialize their lifestyle. The wayfarers' embodied experiences reflect the continuity and changes of a rural Hong Kong. Their making of ruralscape helps alleviate people's anxiety and enhance people's hope concerning the current Hong Kong society that faces food safety issues, environmental degradation, social class disparity and spoon-feeding education. I consider that being an agent who exercises his/her subjectivity during the walking in the ruralscape, a wayfarer makes the ruralscape meaningful in various aspects. My explanation contributes to the theoretical discussion of embodied movement and space making particular to the construction of a politicized nature telling us stories of (in)equality, (in)justice, and hope (lessness).

The colocation of primary care physicians and audiologists in the Chicago metro region reinforces racial, ethnic, and class inequities in spatial access to care

AbstractIn primary‐care‐centric models of care provision, specialist co‐location with primary care physicians (PCPs) can potentially improve care coordination and continuity. This study asks whether the co‐location of specialists with referring PCPs can reinforce racial, ethnic, and class inequities in spatial access to care. Given a US healthcare policy context wherein audiologist services are only reimbursed if they are medical practitioner‐referred, audiologists are hypothesized to co‐locate with PCPs. Using spatial cluster analysis and spatial regression approaches, this study quantifies the tendency for PCPs and audiologists to co‐locate and analyzes the consequences for spatial access disparities in the Chicago, Illinois metropolitan region. Audiologists and PCPs co‐cluster significantly across Chicagoland. The spatial lag model confirms racial, ethnic, and class disparities in network travel distance to audiology services in the core counties of the region. The results suggest that, for audiology services, health policies and the resultant interdependence across the hierarchy of care manifest spatially, possibly reinforcing service access disparities within segregated city regions.

Analyzing the Advantages and Disadvantages of Film Aesthetics and Background Analysis

Based on the deep-rooted class gap in South Korea, “Parasite” is one of the most influential films in the history of Korean cinema. This study will analyze and appreciate the audio-visual language, shooting techniques, skills, and other aspects of the film. Based on its sustained market promotion, it will analyze this cultural product’s comprehensive impact on Korean audiences’ awareness and the image of Eastern culture. Despite the bold plot creation and advanced aesthetics of ‘Parasite’, the distance between its character setting and reality still needs to be improved. The author believes that the character set is in line with the personality of real-life characters and is more conducive to bridging the gap between the film and the audience. The film criticizes the inequality of social class disparities, showcases cruel reality, and warns people that the author believes movies can shape more realistic Eastern character images and improve the overly simplistic setting of the poor.