Lower-class Life Research Articles

Social class and psychological disturbance: The influence of positive and negative experiences

Recent studies by the Midtown investigators found that, except for people experiencing no stress factors, lower class individuals were consistently in poorer mental health than those of higher status — regardless of the number of stress factors experienced. The present paper is concerned with testing the hypothesis that the Midtown findings may be due to a differential distribution of positive experiences in the various classes, experiences which might act to diminish or minimize the influence of stress. Data collected from a sample of 600 residents of a small New England State allowed for the testing of this hypothesis. Analysis of the data suggests that with regard to the relationship between class and psychological disturbance, social class position may be best regarded as a condition affectingboth positive experiences and stress, two variables that are more directly and immediately related to disturbance. While it has long been recognized that there are probably more stresses in lower class life, the possibility that there may also be social class differences in positive experiences which might tend to mitigate against these stresses has been largely ignored by previous investigators.

Social Status and Attitudes Toward Psychological Disorder: The Problem of Tolerance and Deviance

This is a study of attitudes toward psychological disorder on the part of community leaders in contrast to ethnic cross-sections in an area of New York City. Its focus is on two suggestions by previous investigators: first, that there has been a growing acceptance of a mental health orientation toward problems of deviant behavior, especially in high-status groups; second, that there is an apparently greater tolerance of deviance in low-status groups. Results indicate that, while there may be an increasing tendency to use the label mentally ill' for describing different types of deviant behavior, sharp differences in judgments of the seriousness of the problems remain. While psychiatrists' evaluations center on the amount of the individuals underlying psychopathology, the public tends to judge seriousness in terms of the magnitude of the overt threat to others. At the extreme, predisposition to narrow the focus of concern to sociopathic forms of deviance is inversely related to social class and may be reinforced by lower-class life. The appearance of greater tolerance of deviant behavior in low-status groups is an artifact of viewing their attitudes within a high-status frame of reference. When both lowerand upperstatus groups define a pattern of behavior as seriously deviant, lower status groups are less tolerant. Moreover, the relatively tolerant policy of upper-status groups appears to be a consequence of their generally more liberal orientation rather than of comprehension of the nature of psychopathology in psychiatric terms.

Comment On: “Fear and House-as-Haven in the Lower Class”

Abstract The irrelevance of Dr. Rainwater's sociological insights must be apparent to any American housing designer. In a system which almost perfectly insulates him from the needs of lower class families, the social content of housing is the least of the designer's worries. Public housing architects are driven to satisfy the cost limits, the fixation on maintenance, and the bureaucratic routines of local housing authorities and the federal agency. They must conform to the usually gentle, unarticulated American disposition to keep down the poor. At the same time, architects must achieve professional self-realization through the approval of their artistic peers; others count for little. Taken together, these demands so frequently overload their problem-solving capacities, as well as their interests, that designers have little energy left for considering the fine points of behavior-space relationships in lower class life.