Effects Of Social Class Research Articles

How Does Social Class Affect Need for Structure during the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Moderated Mediating Model Analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic is profoundly affecting the minds and behaviors of people worldwide. This study investigated the differences in the need for structure among people from different social classes and the psychological mechanisms underlying this need, as well as the moderating effect of the threat posed by the pandemic. Using data collected from non-student adults in China, we found that the lower an individual’s social class, the lower their need for structure, and this effect was based on the mediating role of perceived control. However, the mediating effect was moderated by pandemic threat, and the above relationship existed only when this threat was low. When the level of pandemic threat was higher, neither the effect of social class nor of perceived control on the need for structure were significant. Specifically, in higher-threat situations, the need for structure among individuals from higher social classes and who had a higher sense of control increased significantly, meaning the mediating effect was no longer significant. This finding showed that under the threat of a pandemic, individuals who have a lower need for structure will still pursue and prefer structure and order. The theoretical and practical implications of the research are also discussed.

Influence of socio-economic status on play development in toddlers – a mother child dyadic interaction based study

PurposeThe present study aimed to analyze the influence of SES on play skills in toddlers during a mother–child dyadic interaction. MethodologyThe study followed a cross sectional study design and included forty toddlers between the ages of 2–3yrs, with their mothers. Participants were divided based on their SES into two groups as Group 1[Middle Socio-Economic State (MSES)] and Group 2 [Lower Socio- Economic Status (LSES)] with an equal number of participants in each group (20). Dyadic interaction between the mother and the toddler was recorded for 25minutes for both the groups. The first and the last 5minutes were excluded from the analysis and the middle 15minutes were coded using the Play observation Scheme. Results and conclusionThe present study findings indicate a strong social class effect on the play skills demonstrated by toddlers. The findings of the present study indicated that the occurrences of interactive play such as Associative and Cooperative play were higher in toddlers of the MSES group compared to the LSES group. Another interesting finding is the significant difference in the occurrence of Simple and Complex pretend play between the two groups, with the MSES group outperforming their peers in the LSES group. An insight into the play skills of toddlers from low-income household would be helpful in creating awareness about the importance of play for holistic child development. It could also aid in the development of play assessment and intervention for toddlers from these socio-economic strata.

Entrepreneurial activities of Canadian Bangladeshi women in Toronto: a family perspective

ABSTRACT Applying a family lens, the study illustrates how family resources and gender roles shape the entrepreneurship pathways of immigrant women. With its focus on the family, the study contributes to intersectional research about immigrant entrepreneurs that considers the effects of gender and social class, as well as, ethnicity. Drawing on the narratives of Bangladeshi women who migrated to Toronto as spouses of skilled male immigrants, the research examines their decisions to start and operate home-based and non-home-based businesses. Though similar employment barriers faced many Bangladeshi couples in Toronto, gender roles and family resources influenced the women’s strategies to combat economic marginalisation and loss of middle-class status. The home-based businesses operated by Bangladeshi women required little financial capital and offered services and goods produced with domestic resources while the non-home-based businesses operated by Bangladeshi women often complemented existing family enterprises.

The Effects of Objective and Subjective Social Class on Leadership Emergence

AbstractWe develop and test predictions about how differences in people’s social class backgrounds, as well as interpersonal perceptions of social class, influence leadership emergence as teams change tasks and group membership. Drawing on adaptive leadership theory, we test distinct pathways for how team members’ social class backgrounds contribute to their likelihood of emerging as a leader. Using data from two samples consisting of 90 teams and over 500 individuals, we find consistent support for a person’s objective class background informing subjective perceptions of social class, which in turn predict leadership emergence. Our findings extend recent research examining the relevance of social class in leadership research by demonstrating how interpersonal judgments of one’s class position contribute to leader emergence even as the group’s membership or task changes and irrespective of an individual’s performance. By examining the role of social class in these informal, yet important, attributions of leadership, our study identifies potential avenues by which class‐based inequalities can be reproduced within contemporary organizations.

The Effect of Social Class on the Linguistic Behavior of Saudi Female Employees at Al-Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University

This study aimed to investigate how the linguistic behaviors of Saudi female employees at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University index their social class identity. The study used a holistic case with embedded units design. The researchers carried out interviews to collect the data. The interview questions were validated by eight EFL university professors. Besides, the discourse analysis was discussed based on the ethnography of communicative approach and the interactional sociolinguistics approach. The data analysis revealed that the linguistic behavior of the Saudi female employees yielded variant extents of indexation to their social class identity in terms of self-esteem, prestige, and power. The results proved that the linguistic behavior of the professors indexed their high-class identity in terms of their high level of self-esteem, high level of prestigious state, and high level of possessing power emotions. In addition, the linguistic behavior of the security employees indexed only two phases of their middle-class identity which were unsuccessful attempts to be prestigious speakers and their moderate sense of power. Finally, the indexation of the workers’ identity as low-class speakers was manifested in their linguistic behavior in terms of the low level of self-esteem and lack of power possession emotions.

Class actions: The impact of CEO social class origin on firm competitive repertoires

We build on upper-echelons theory to argue that CEO social class impacts firm competitive repertoires. Specifically, we suggest that CEO social class origin impacts whether CEOs favor complex versus simpler competitive actions and competitive conformity versus non-conformity, based on their early experiences and the associated preferences. We further suggest that the effect of CEO social class on competitive actions is strengthened when CEOs face threats to their social status. We test our hypotheses using primary survey data on CEO social class origin and secondary data on firm competitive actions, with a sample of 601 firm-year observations and find support for our predictions. Our paper offers important contributions to research on upper-echelons, social class and competitive dynamics.

Social Class in Organizations: Entrance, Promotion, and Organizational and Societal Consequences of the Corporate Elite

Organizational theorists studying executives of large corporations have long theorized that top management is dominated by elites of upper social class background. Organizations reflect the class system in the societies they are situated in by advantaging those of higher social class background. If organizations are perpetuating societal inequality by favoring those from higher social class and positioning them to dictate organizational outcomes, it is important to understand ways to reduce inequality by increasing social class diversity, and theorize on the implications of this diversity for business and society. This article brings together scholars on the forefront of social class research to understand the influence of social class on the corporate elite. The scholars explore the effect of social class in attaining access to the most influential managerial positions, conditions that enable greater diversity, and how the corporate elite can affect firm strategic actions and key societal outcomes.

Human capital dynamics: the geographical mobility of high-school graduates towards university in Italy

ABSTRACT The paper studies the geographical mobility of high-school graduates who change their residence to enrol in university in Italy, a country with deep geographical socioeconomic cleavages. While the previous literature has mostly focused on interregional mobility, we define mobility at the provincial level in order to observe both long- and short-distance movements. Our descriptive results show that students’ geographical mobility follows the distribution of universities, while only long-distance mobility follows the socioeconomic cleavages of the country. Our micro-level model shows a positive effect of students’ social class of origin, gender and previous school performance. These effects are stronger in the south, while the effect of social class is the same over geographical areas.

You May Have My Help but Not Necessarily My Care: The Effect of Social Class and Empathy on Prosociality.

Previous research has focused on the relation between social class and prosocial behavior. However, this relation is yet unclear. In this work, we shed light on this issue by considering the effect of the level of empathy and the social class of the recipient of help on two types of prosociality, namely helping and caring. In one experimental study, we found that for high-class participants, empathy had a positive effect on helping, regardless of the recipient’s social class. However, empathy had no effect for low-class participants. When it comes to caring, empathy had a positive effect for both high and low-class participants, but only when the recipient of help belonged to the same social class. This highlights that empathy by itself is not sufficient to promote cooperative relations and that the social class of the recipient of help should be taken into account to shed light on this issue.

Social Class—Not Income Inequality—Predicts Social and Institutional Trust

Trust is the social glue that holds society together. The academic consensus is that trust is weaker among lower-class individuals and in unequal regions/countries, which is often considered a threat to a healthy society. However, existing studies are inconsistent and have two limitations: (i) variability in the measurement of social class and (ii) small numbers of higher level units (regions/countries). We addressed these problems using large-scale (cross-)national representative surveys (encompassing 560,000+ participants from 1,500+ regional/national units). Multilevel analysis led to two consistent sets of findings. First, the effects of social class on social trust were systematically positive, whereas the effects on institutional trust depended on the way social class was measured. Second, the effects of income inequality on social and institutional trust were systematically nonsignificant and smaller than the smallest negative effect of interest. Our findings suggest that researchers need to update their knowledge: social class—not income inequality—predicts trust.

Both parents matter. Family-based educational inequality in Italy over the second half of the 20th century

Research on educational inequalities, as well as social stratification research in general, has since long conceptualized and operationalized social origins using parental status, in particular their occupational position and/or educational achievement. The theoretical rationale is that an individual’s social position depends on his/her household. As a matter of fact, often in actual research practice only paternal characteristics have been used, either on theoretical grounds or using the so-called “dominance” coding. Such a practice is not tenable today, when women systematically outperform men in educational achievement and where their labour market partecipation has dramatically raised. The paper shows how father-based and single-parent codings systematically bias the estimates of inequality of educational opportunities (IEO), particularly concerning its trend over time. It studies systematically how different codings of social origins, by including or excluding relevant information, change the empirical results of models of IEO for the Italian case. It uses survey data from three waves (1998, 2003 and 2008) of the MultiPurpose Survey carried out by the Italian National Institute for Statistics (Istat), in order to compare the fit and the parameters estimates for the association between parental education and educational achievement of a set of logit models of IEO and of its trend over time, where different measurement strategies of social origin, as indexed by parental education, are used. This is done for two school transitions, namely achieving at least upper secondary and achieving tertiary, including all post-secondary titles. We also compare the magnitude of the effect of parental social class and education, confirming the latter to be stronger than the former. Results show that models where social origin is measured including information concerning both parents reproduce the data better than models relying on one parent only. The dominance approach underestimates the association between parental education and respondent's education when parents have a similar educational title, while it overestimates it when a wider education gap is found between parents. In particular, a “full interaction” coding, exploiting all available information by considering all combinations of maternal and paternal education, provides the best fit for models of the transition to upper secondary education, while concerning the transition to a tertiary title the “reduced interaction” coding, which does not consider the dominant parent in non-homogamic parental couples, is statistically equivalent to the full interaction one. Our analysis shows that including both parents significantly changes the resulting evidence concerning the trend of IEO over cohorts: models using the interacted coding of social origin, exploiting all available information, show a clearer picture of a declining IEO over time, this decrease being mostly determined by the offspring of low-educated parents and of those parental couples where the maternal educational level is dominant with respect to the paternal one.

High educational attainment redresses the effect of occupational social class on health-related lifestyle: findings from four Spanish national health surveys

PurposeSocial determinants as occupational social class or educational attainment might influence health outcomes. This phenomenon is known as the social gradient of health and is related to a skewed distribution of health behaviours that might explain differences in morbidity and mortality between social groups. But social class and educational attainment differ in their nature and might have distinct effects on health. Here we study the combined effect of educational attainment and occupational social class on health-related lifestyle. MethodsWe retrieved data from four large-scale, national representative Spanish surveys (n = 67,171). A latent class regression analysis was run to identify clusters of health-related lifestyle behaviours. Clusters were made according to sociodemographic factors, including a combined analysis of education and occupational social class. ResultsHigher educational attainment and occupational social class were associated with a healthier lifestyle for both sexes. The combined analysis of education and social class indicated that women with secondary education showed a high risk combination of unhealthy behaviours, as men with middle, primary or no education. ConclusionsRegardless of social class, a higher educational attainment redresses the effect of occupational social class on health-related behaviours. Our results suggest that education likely plays a crucial role in population health outcomes through its effects on lifestyle.

Social class, social self-esteem, and conspicuous consumption

Previous research has suggested the negative relationship between self-esteem and conspicuous consumption since conspicuous consumption is aimed to gain social recognition and signal status. However, it has not been much explored how this relationship holds depending on social classes. We propose subjective social class will moderate the relationship between social self-esteem and conspicuous consumption. We also hypothesize the mediating roles of social dominance orientation and life satisfaction in the proposed moderation effect. By conducting the survey with the American sample, we tested these predictions. In Study 1, we showed that the negative relationship between social self-esteem and conspicuous consumption appeared only among high subjective social class individuals. In Study 2, we replicated Study 1 and further demonstrated that social dominance orientation and life satisfaction respectively mediated the interactive effect of subjective social class and social self-esteem on conspicuous consumption. The results suggest that among individuals who perceive themselves to be in a high social class, a low level of social self-esteem is conducive to conspicuous consumption. The theoretical implications and limitations of the present investigation are discussed.

Erratum: Assimilating and Differentiating: The Curvilinear Effect of Social Class on Green Consumption

Erratum: Assimilating and Differentiating: The Curvilinear Effect of Social Class on Green Consumption

The closed academy? Guild power and academic social class

AbstractAcademic inbreeding is a deeply ingrained practice which needs to be understood by reference to the medieval guilds. Drawing on the guild concept and associated benefits of forms of capital, a distinction is drawn between ‘guild‐route’ academics who have followed a privileged, linear path into academe and their ‘non‐guild’ counterparts who tend to enter later in their career from the professions or industry, often without a PhD. The tendency to represent early career researchers from a guild background as members of an academic proletariat is largely misleading and fails to take account of their privileged entrée into academe. Their experience is contrasted with those recruited via the non‐guild route who do not have the benefits of the valued social, cultural or symbolic capital needed to advance their careers. Policy implications are discussed to better understand the effects of academic social class on recruitment practices in universities.

Positional, Mobility, and Reference Effects: How Does Social Class Affect Life Satisfaction in Europe?

Abstract In this study, we analyse the effects of social class on life satisfaction. We develop a theoretical framework that shows how social class affects life satisfaction through five different pathways. Informed by this framework, we estimate the direct effects of class destination and class origin, the effect of own intergenerational class mobility, as well as the effects of others’ class position and mobility. To do so, we utilize European Social Survey waves 1 to 5 (2002–2010) and obtain information on life satisfaction as well as destination and origin class for about 80,000 respondents in 32 European countries. We find (i) class destination consistently and strongly structures life satisfaction across Europe, (ii) own class mobility has a significant impact on life satisfaction in Eastern Europe, as does (iii) the class mobility of others. The last finding points to the hitherto neglected importance of reference effects when considering the impact of social class on life satisfaction.

Complex Modernization: The Value of Children and Social Transformation in Contemporary Vietnam

The value of children has emerged as an important lens in understanding social changes and individual decision-making concerning childbearing and childrearing. The current study illustrates the usefulness of this lens in the context of contemporary Vietnam, based on a national representative survey dataset. We develop a theoretical framework incorporating three sets of structural factors (cohort, South or North, family SES) plus demographic factors to understand the valuation of children and its fertility implications. We reveal the following findings. First, we document a generally higher emotional value than instrumental value among Vietnamese respondents across cohorts. Moreover, the post-reform birth cohort reports both lower emotional and lower instrumental value of children; and the Southern sample on average holds higher emotional and higher instrumental values of children than the Northern sample. Second, in regression analysis, the emotional value of children shows little variation and the proposed factors explain a lower proportion of its variation, but we capture a strong cohort effect, regional divide and social class effect on the instrumental value of children. Last, while there exists a negative association between emotional valuation of children and respondents’ fertility, and a positive association between instrumental valuation of children and respondents’ fertility, such effects have been reduced to non-significant levels once independent variables (birth cohort, region, and family SES) are controlled. This study challenges and complicates the dominant discourse in existing literature on the rise of the “emotionally valuable” and “economically and instrumentally useless” child in modern societies. We instead reveal that respondents’ value orientations and their impact on fertility trends should be contextualized in Vietnam’s historical and political trajectory of ‘complex modernization’.

The Effects of both Social Class of Adolescents Formed in Online Game World and Gaming Time on the Acceptance of Moral Issues

The Effects of both Social Class of Adolescents Formed in Online Game World and Gaming Time on the Acceptance of Moral Issues

Unraveling the Effects of Social Class and Systemic Racism on Advance Care Planning

While advance care planning (ACP) is recognized as a key facilitator of high-quality, goal-concordant end-of-life care, black Americans are less likely to participate in ACP than non-Hispanic whites (Carr 2011; Detering et al. 2010). There are divided explanations for why these disparities persist. Some scholars attribute racial disparities in end-of-life care to socioeconomic (SES) differences between black and white Americans citing blacks’ and whites’ differentiated access to, control over, and use of material resources (Wilson 1978; Yearby 2011). Others assert that health care preferences do not solely reflect lack of resources or health literacy, but that the larger social context frames care preferences differently across racial and ethnic groups in American society (Alegria et al. 2011; Sewell and Pingel forthcoming). By turning the analytical lens to class-privileged black Americans, I investigate whether racism overflows the margins of class disadvantage. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, I ran logistic regression and moderation models. I found that class-privileged blacks are less likely to engage in ACP than both high-SES and low-SES whites. The interaction of race and SES was negatively and significantly associated with ACP (OR=0.91; P<0.05), indicating that SES has a stronger effect on the probability of ACP among whites than among blacks. Predicted probabilities show that 51% of low-SES whites are likely to engage in ACP compared to 32% of high-SES blacks. These findings indicate that racialized disparities in ACP exist independent of SES, and that the effects of SES and race are intersectional rather than simply additive.

The Effect of Crown Social Class on Bark Thickness and Sapwood Moisture Content in Norway Spruce

The research study examined the effect of tree properties (crown social class, diameter at breast height (DBH), and tree height) on bark thickness (BT) and sapwood moisture content (SMC) in Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.). Both examined variables were shown to be positively affected by DBH and tree height. The relationship between DBH and SMC varied among crown social classes, while the relationship between DBH and BT was relatively constant across crown social classes. Crown social class had a relatively small effect on BT and SMC, having a more pronounced effect on SMC than on BT. The relationship between tree height and BT did not vary across crown social classes, while the relationship between SMC and tree height was found to change slightly across crown social classes. Measurements of BT and SMC in the field are affordable, fast, and easy to use. Both variables could potentially be used to improve predictions of bark beetle attacks, as they reflect the physiological state of an individual tree.