Social Class and Classism

Defining Social Class and Socioeconomic Status

Social class may be regarded as a cultural construct and part of a psychologist's multicultural competency. But insofar as social class and classism are ubiquitous in an individual's life span, psychologists need to understand it as more than just a cultural variable. For many psychologists, the main difficulty of using social class is definitional. A few questions may be: What is the difference between social class and socioeconomic status? How is it measured? Is social class a position, or is it malleable?

To begin, several researchers have suggested that there is no real conceptual difference between social class and socioeconomic status (SES). The variations in research are a result of different conceptualizations by researchers as well as the use of differing variables to measure their operationalization of social class or SES. In a review of three counseling and psychology journals across 20 years (1981–2000), Liu and his colleagues found authors used more than 400 different terms to conceptualize social class or SES (e.g., inequality, poverty). Similar results have also been found in educational psychology journals where social class is seldom measured or meaningfully analyzed. Additionally, researchers have varied in defining social class or SES as access to money, resources, mobility, or power and have also speculated that social class and SES are static positions related to inequality or poverty. For the purpose of this entry, social class is used throughout this entry because it is nominally easier to link with classism. Also, social class reflects the stratification that is both the cause and consequence of inequality. Additionally, people are likely to interact with others based on perceived social class differences.

Social class is also co-constructed with classism much like race and racism are interdependent constructs. That is, the operationalization of race cannot exist without the explicit or implicit function of racism to create rigid categories based on phenotypes or other manifest physical features. Similarly, social class cannot exist without the function of classism to create stratification and inequality. Individuals would not categorize other individuals into varying social class groups if there were no privilege or gain associated with a hierarchy of groups. In this case, classism functions to unequally distribute privilege and gain within and across various social class groups. Therefore, it is important to discuss social class and classism together to reinforce the relationship between social class position and the inequality that creates it.

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