Journal of Social Issues最新文献

In introducing the special issue, Society in the Classroom: Multilevel Perspectives on Socioeconomic Inequalities in Education, we begin by challenging the assumption that educational institutions are neutral sites merely reflecting socioeconomic inequalities that originate beyond them. Instead, we consider how socioeconomic disparities and biases pervade educational settings and may be perpetuated by the very function of privileging particular standards and practices, a function that is central to institutions serving the dominant societal classes. Compiled 20 years after the last time the Journal of Social Issues focused on the psychology of social class in the context of education, this issue takes stock of research on this topic with a focus on approaches that go beyond the individual level of analysis. Although research reported in the issue is predominantly conducted with majority ethnic samples in the United States and Western Europe, it engages with intersectional concerns by attending to power and interlocking processes of oppression.

Socioeconomic and ethnicity-based achievement gaps plague education. Both sociological theories and recent social-psychological work consider cultural mismatches between schools’ and students’ ways of being and relating (i.e., self-construal) as a potential mechanism. However, stringent empirical evidence remains lacking. Drawing on a sample of 5076 Belgian adolescents, this study aims to provide rigorous and robust novel evidence by (i) establishing high SES and ethnic majority group average patterns of self in relation to their teacher; (ii) calculating students’ ‘fit’ with these dominant group's patterns; and (iii) linking fit indices to objective and subjective achievement scores. As expected, fit with both high-SES and ethnic majority self-patterns were significantly positively related to achievement. Our findings suggest hitherto less visible systemic barriers to equal attainment due to engrained school practices that selectively value and reward majority middle-class self-ways. One way to promote equity in education is recognising and reforming such practices in schools.

The Covid-19 outbreak forced families and teachers to use digital technology to support students to engage in distance learning at home. According to their social class, families’ digital equipment, competences and uses vary markedly, which in turn, impacts children's academic achievement. Social class has also a great influence on cultural and parental practices at home, as well as on parental self-efficacy regarding supporting children's academic achievement. The present study investigated whether, within a single model, structural factors, including home environment, cultural capital, and digital capital, contribute both directly and indirectly (via parental self-efficacy) to the development of academic inequalities during homework. As predicted, analyses showed that families from working-class backgrounds are less equipped and feel less competent in digital technology as compared to families from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Our findings also showed that families’ social class is a significant predictor of cultural capital and parental self-efficacy which in turn contributes to educational inequalities in achievement. Future studies should delve deeper into the role of parental practices and their involvement, during homework, to educational inequalities.

In seven studies, this research demonstrates that both the general public and educators may hold culturally-shared, class stereotype-laden mental representations that they reflexively use both to subjectively identify particular students as being high or low in academic ability, and determine who should receive educational support. Using procedures designed to capture people's mental images of others, we first observed that both the general public and aspiring educators mentally represent low-ability students as qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from high-ability students. Furthermore, the representations of low (vs. high) ability students captured from the public and aspiring educators were more likely to be associated with negative class-based academic stereotypes by separate samples of the public and educators, such that a student who “looks” low in ability was also more likely to be labeled as being low-SES, and having poorer academic motivation and work ethic. As a result, the low (vs. high) ability student was more likely to be denied college admissions or scholarship support by members of the American public and to be exposed to unsupportive instructional practices by teachers. Implications for our understanding of teacher biases are discussed.

Research into the relation between occupational aspirations and academic achievement has substantially grown. What remains unclear, however, is whether and how this relation, including the direction of effects, (1) unfolds dynamically in middle childhood and adolescence and (2) varies by socioeconomic status (SES). The present study aimed to address this, using the contemporary and nationally representative data from England through the UK's Millennium Cohort Study (Analytic N = 5517) and applying random intercept cross-lagged panel modelling. Results showed that achievement unidirectionally and positively predicted aspirations in middle childhood. Achievement and aspirations predicted each other cyclically in adolescence, although their magnitudes varied. Moderation analysis demonstrated that this cyclical relation in adolescence was only significant amongst high and medium SES groups. For the low SES group, aspirations did not significantly predict achievement at any age point, despite relatively high aspirations. We discuss theoretical and practical implications, especially the differential effect of occupational aspirations in driving academic outcomes by SES.

This article presents an ethnographic study conducted in French pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms, investigating how education establishes and reinforces relations of sociocultural dominance. Building on Bourdieu and Passeron's concept of symbolic violence, we seek to uncover the mechanisms through which school socialization encourages the acceptance of the hierarchies it generates. The data suggest that this persuasion relies on set of interrelated processes: Schools organize the unequal profitability of family cultural practices and knowledge, obscure the realities of learning, and foster a meritocratic myth that naturalizes these inequalities. Moreover, children actively participate in their own subordination without realizing it. By documenting these processes, the study provides critical insights into how everyday schooling practices not only perpetuate social inequalities but also shape early on the idea that students form of themselves as both students and individuals and intensify concerns about self-worth.

The culture cycle details how cultural ideas, institutional practices, daily interactions, and psychological processes mutually reinforce (and disrupt) social class inequities in U.S. education contexts. Attending to how the intersections of classism, racism, and sexism shape culture cycle processes unearths nuances in social class inequities and their consequences. In this paper, we argue that by taking a critical race perspective to the culture cycle framework, or a critical race culture cycle lens for short, we can more fully interrogate interrelated power structures in educational contexts that dynamically influence each other over time to shape students’ unique psychological realities of marginalization and, importantly, their acts of resistance. To build our argument, we first describe the utility of a culture cycle study of social class inequities. We then illustrate how a critical race culture cycle lens sharpens psychological investigations of these inequities. We offer cultural mismatch theory as an illustrative example for our argument and showcase how such a lens provokes a different set of research questions that attend to power, intersectionality, and resistance. Finally, we discuss how a critical race culture cycle lens offers new opportunities for theory and research in the study of social class inequities more broadly.

Social class researchers in social psychology have pushed the field to become more focused on and attentive to the critical role of sociocultural contexts. In this article, we label and articulate the key ingredients of the approach that many social psychological researchers have come to use: what we refer to as a social-class-in-context perspective. This perspective means attending to the contextual differences in resources that create social class differences in psychology and behavior. We also suggest some additional steps that researchers can take to become even more attentive to and responsive to the important role of contexts in creating social class. As a first step, we suggest the importance of adopting a definition of social class that directly explicates its relationship to similar constructs, such as power and status, and also links it to the contexts that produce it. Second, building on this definition of social class, we then describe the importance of taking a multi-level approach to understanding how different social class contexts shape psychology and behavior. Finally, we articulate the important implications and future directions that emerge from intentionally adopting this perspective.

Children use school as a way to imagine and strive toward their futures. We analyzed thousands of essays written by children in Britain in the late 1960s about what their lives would be like as adults. We used a bottom-up approach to explore naturally occurring topics in these essays and tested how these topics varied with children's social class context and their adult outcomes. Higher education was the most prevalent topic in these children's essays; children whose fathers—and maternal grandfathers—had higher-status occupations were especially likely to write about this, as well as about interests in teaching, medicine, and the military. Children in lower class contexts were especially likely to write about making money, but also about family and daily responsibilities. We further found that—controlling for family background—children who wrote more about higher education and less about money-making tended to achieve education, status, and income.