Approaches to differentiating the dimensions of social class

Abstract

The concept of social class is not new: for centuries, people have recognized their own and others’ positions in a hierarchy based on their relative access to material, social and cultural capital. However, this concept caught psychologists’ sustained interest only three decades ago, and conflicting findings have emerged. These contradictions might reflect the fact that there are multiple forms of social class, meaning that different measures of social class might not be interchangeable. For example, the psychological consequences of working a high-paying job might have little to do with the psychological consequences of coming from a family in which most people have university degrees. In this Review, I examine three fault lines scholars have noted in the construct of social class: subjective versus objective, rank versus culture, and adult (current) versus childhood. Each of these approaches has yielded important insights. At the same time, there is conceptual overlap between these contrasts, and more research is needed to systematically distinguish among them. Conflicting findings about the psychological effects of social class might arise because different operationalizations represent conceptually different constructs. In this Review, Laurin describes three approaches to studying social class and how each approach might help to account for conflicting findings.