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what factors affect social class

by Eliza Herman MD Published 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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4 Main Criteria used in the Determination of Social Class

  • (1) Wealth and Income: Possession of substantial amounts of wealth is the main characteristic distinguishing the upper class from other class groups in society. ...
  • (2) Occupation: Occupation is an exceedingly important aspect of social class and as such it is another determinant of class status. ...
  • (3) Education: There is a close reciprocal relationship between social class and education. ...
  • (4) Prestige: ...

Most sociologists define social class as a grouping based on similar social factors like wealth, income, education, and occupation. These factors affect how much power and prestige a person has.

Full Answer

What factors decide a person's social class?

Factors That Affect Social Class

  • Factors That Affect The Social Location Of A Person With Race, Class, Age, Sexuality, And. ...
  • Social Stratification : Social Class, Ethnicity, Age, And Gender. ...
  • Five Major Academic Factors That Affect College Success. ...
  • The Affects Of Social Class Inequality On Higher Education

What is social class, and why does it matter?

Social classes act like sub-cultures, the personality development of the child is affected in many ways by social classes. His goals, interests and habits are affected by the needs of social world he lives in. His moral standards are equally class-typed. Studies of child development and socialisation show that there is a lot of difference in ...

What are the determinants of social class?

fThe determinants of social class are subjective or material items mainly but they also consist of some objective interests or belongings. A social class may be distinguished from one another depending upon many factors. These factors/determinants are greatly influenced by ones belief, religion and personal interests.

How does social class influence people?

class people cannot freely work together with the low-class members because they consider them unfit. The aspects of the class, which include financial stability, wealth, and power, influence the attitudes and behavior of people because it leads to segregation and discrimination.

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What are the most important factors that determine social class?

A focus on objective social class entails a direct determination of a person's social class based on socioeconomic variables -- mainly income, wealth, education and occupation.

What are the factors that determine social status?

Socioeconomic status is the position of an individual or group on the socioeconomic scale, which is determined by a combination of social and economic factors such as income, amount and kind of education, type and prestige of occupation, place of residence, and—in some societies or parts of society—ethnic origin or ...

What are the 5 social classes?

One objective way some researchers divide individuals into economic classes is by looking at their income. From that data, they split earners into different classes such as poor, lower-middle class, middle class, upper-middle class and wealthy.

What are the three determinants of social class?

An individual's socioeconomic position can be shaped by various factors such as their education, occupation, or income. All of these factors (social determinants) impact the health and well-being of people and the communities they interact with.

What are the 6 social factors?

Some of the most important factors of social change are as under:Physical Environment:Demographic (biological) Factor:Cultural Factor:Ideational Factor:Economic Factor:Political Factor:

What are the characteristics of social class?

Characteristics features of Social Class in IndiaThe members of each class have relatively the same status.Persons within a given class tend to behave alike.Social class is hierarchical.Social class is measured by a combination of variables.Social class is mobile.Social class and status differentiation.

What is social class example?

A social class is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle and lower classes. Membership in a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.

How does social class affect people's lives?

"Class affects whether someone is going to be accepted into a particular kind of school, their likelihood of succeeding in that school, the kinds of jobs they have access to, the kinds of friends they make" — in essence, the degree of status, power and perks people enjoy or lack in their daily lives.

What are the 7 levels of social class?

More complex models propose as many as a dozen class levels, including levels such as high upper class, upper class, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class, lower class and lower lower middle class.

What is meant by social class?

Social Class refers to divisions in society based on economic and social status. People in the same social class typically share a similar level of wealth, educational achievement, type of job and income.

What factors determine social class quizlet?

A person's social class is difficult to determine. It depends on many factors, including occupation, sources of income, marketable abilities, access to consumer good and services, and membership in status groups and political parties.

What are the five causes of social stratification?

Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into rankings based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and power.

What is social status and examples?

Social status refers to the level of prestige, privilege, and honor someone is perceived to have in society. Examples of social status include your profession, clothing, car, political affiliation, postcode, and affiliation to schools, groups, or organizations.

What are the different types of social status?

There are three types of social statuses. Achieved status is earned based on merit; ascribed status is given to us by virtue of birth; and master status is the social status we view as the most important.

What are the 4 factors that affect a community?

They are broken into four categories: human elements, social factors, environment and geography, and resources. Each factor discussed in the article is only a factor that may possibly be present in a community that can contribute towards community development.

What are the 4 types of socio economic factors?

Socio-economic factors include occupation, education, income, wealth and where someone lives.

How many older people live below poverty?

Nearly three-fourths of older adults live below the poverty level, she said. Moreover, nearly 40 percent of people in rural areas of the United States are living in poverty. "That is a huge correlation," Stamm said. "Clearly, rural and poverty go together.".

What did psychologists convey about poverty?

Psychologists conveyed poverty's mental health effects on the disadvantaged and chronically ill.

Does poverty cause mental health problems?

The constraints of poverty can cause a cycle of poor mental and physical health, according to psychologists who presented research at APA's 2003 Annual Convention on the impact of poverty on people's well-being.

Does poverty affect HIV?

Specifically, they found that poverty was related to depression and anxiety in the participants, which in turn negatively affected their HIV prognosis. Dove said psychologists need to better address this social class factor and how it can potentially influence mental health.

How does social class affect people?

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle‐class counterparts, lower/working‐class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self‐concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working‐class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working‐class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle‐class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working‐class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working‐class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. This means that redistributive policies are needed to break the cycle of deprivation that limits opportunities and threatens social cohesion.

How does subjective social class affect health outcomes?

There is evidence from health psychology that measures of objective and subjective social class have independent effects on health outcomes, with subjective social class explaining variation in health outcomes over and above what can be accounted for in terms of objective social class (Adler, Epel, Castellazzo, & Ickovics, 2000; Cohen et al ., 2008 ). For example, in the prospective study by Cohen et al. ( 2008 ), 193 volunteers were exposed to a cold or influenza virus and monitored in quarantine for objective and subjective signs of illness. Higher subjective class was associated with less risk of becoming ill as a result of virus exposure, and this relation was independent of objective social class. Additional analyses suggested that the impact of subjective social class on likelihood of becoming ill was due in part to differences in sleep quantity and quality. The most plausible explanation for such findings is that low subjective social class is associated with greater stress. It may be that seeing oneself as being low in subjective class is itself a source of stress, or that it increases vulnerability to the effects of stress.

What is the model of how differences in material conditions generate social class differences and differences in social cognition, emotion, and?

Integrative model of how differences in material conditions generate social class differences and differences in social cognition, emotion, and behaviour.

What is the tradition of social science?

Turning to the attitudes to broader social issues held by members of different social classes, there is a long tradition in social science of arguing that working‐class people are more prejudiced on a number of issues , especially with respect to ethnic minorities and immigrants (e.g., Lipset, 1959).

How do schools reproduce social inequalities?

However, as Bourdieu and Passeron ( 1990) have argued, the school system reproduces social inequalities by promoting norms and values that are more familiar to children from middle‐class backgrounds. To the extent that this helps middle‐class children to outperform their working‐class peers, the ‘meritocratic’ belief that such performance differences are due to differences in ability and/or effort will serve to ‘explain’ and legitimate unequal performance. Consistent with this argument, Darnon, Wiederkehr, Dompnier, and Martinot ( 2018) primed the concept of merit in French fifth‐grade schoolchildren and found that this led to lower scores on language and mathematics tests – but that this only applied to low‐SES children. Moreover, the effect of the merit prime on test performance was mediated by the extent to which the children endorsed meritocratic beliefs. Here, then, is evidence that the ideology of meritocracy helps to reproduce social class differences in school settings.

How does social class shape self-concept?

Stephens, Markus, and Phillips ( 2014) have analysed the ways in which social class shapes the self‐concept through the ‘gateway contexts’ of home, school, and work. With a focus on the United States, but with broader implications, they argue that social class gives rise to culture‐specific selves and patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. One type of self they label ‘hard interdependence.’ This, they argue, is characteristic of those who grow up in low‐income, working‐class environments. As the authors put it, ‘With higher levels of material constraints and fewer opportunities for influence, choice, and control, working‐class contexts tend to afford an understanding of the self and behavior as interdependent with others and the social context’ (p. 615). The ‘hard’ aspect of this self derives from the resilience that is needed to cope with adversity. The other type of self the authors identify is ‘expressive independence’, which is argued to be typical of those who grow up in affluent, middle‐class contexts. By comparison with working‐class people, those who grow up in middle‐class households ‘need to worry far less about making ends meet or overcoming persistent threats … Instead, middle‐class contexts enable people to act in ways that reflect and further reinforce the independent cultural ideal – expressing their personal preferences, influencing their social contexts, standing out from others, and developing and exploring their own interests’ (p. 615). Stephens and colleagues review a wide range of work on socialization that supports their argument that the contexts of home, school and workplace foster these different self‐conceptions. They also argue that middle‐class schools and workplaces use expressive independence as a standard for measuring success, and thereby create institutional barriers to upward social mobility.

What is social psychological analysis?

Social psychological analyses of identity have traditionally not paid much attention to social class or SES as a component of identity. Instead, the focus has been on categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and age.

How is social class determined?

In this sense, social class is determined strongly by one's level of cultural capital, a concept developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) in his 1979 work "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.". Bourdieu said that levels of class are determined by the attainment of a specific set of knowledge, behaviors, ...

What is social class?

In a technical sense, however, social class is used to refer specifically to the characteristics that are less likely to change, or harder to change, than one's economic status, which is potentially changeable over time. In such a case, social class refers to the socio-cultural aspects of one's life, namely the traits, behaviors, knowledge, and lifestyle that one is socialized into by one's family. This is why class descriptors like "lower," "working," "upper," or "high" can have social as well as economic implications for how we understand the person described.

Why is socioeconomic class more complex than economic class?

Socio-economic class is a more complex formulation than economic class because it takes into account the social status attached to certain professions considered prestigious, like doctors and professors, for example, and to educational attainment as measured in academic degrees.

How does socialization affect people?

It also affects who one knows socially, and the extent to which those people can provide advantageous economic and employment opportunities, political participation and power, and even health and life expectancy, among many other things.

What is economic class?

Economic class refers specifically to how one ranks relative to others in terms of income and wealth. Simply put, we are sorted into groups by how much money we have. These groups are commonly understood as lower (the poorest), middle, and upper class (the richest).

Who created the social stratification model?

This model is inspired by the theories of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who viewed the stratification of society as a result of the combined influences of economic class, social status (the level of a person's prestige or honor relative to others), and group power (what he called "party"). Weber defined "party" as the level of one's ...

Why Does It Matter?

So why does class, however you want to name it or slice it, matter? It matters to sociologists because the fact that it exists reflects unequal access to rights, resources, and power in society —what we call social stratification. As such, it has a strong effect on the access an individual has to education, the quality of that education, and how high a level he or she can reach. It also affects who one knows socially, and the extent to which those people can provide advantageous economic and employment opportunities, political participation and power, and even health and life expectancy, among many other things.

How do social factors affect people?

So, it can impact the sales of products and revenues earned. The social factors shape who we are as people. It affects how we behave and what we buy. A good example is how people’s attitude towards diet and health is changing in the UK.

What are the social aspects of a person?

Attitudes toward work, career, leisure, and retirement. Attitudes toward customer service and product quality. The social aspect focuses on the forces within society. Family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and the media are social factors. These factors can affect our attitudes, opinions, and interests.

What are some examples of social media changes?

The tastes and fashions are a great example of this change. One of the most significant differences is the growing popularity of social media. Social networking sites like Facebook have become very popular among younger people. The young consumers have grown used to mobile phones and computers. The younger generation prefers to use digital ...

How does the Wii Fit affect society?

Products often take advantage of social factors. The Wii Fit, for instance, attempt to deal with society’s concern about children’s lack of exercise. Population changes are also directly affecting organizations. The supply and demand of goods and services in an economy can change with the structure of the population.

Why is Pepsi a social company?

The key reason behind this is perhaps that Pepsi is a non-alcoholic beverage. It has to maintain strict differences in cultures around the world.

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1.Factors That Affect Social Class - 854 Words | Bartleby

Url:https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Factors-That-Affect-Social-Class-PK46Z9KVUXYW

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2.The social class factor - American Psychological …

Url:https://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/socialclass

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3.Videos of What Factors Affect Social Class

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35 hours ago  · Besides wealth, occupation and education, there are certain other criteria which help a person to attain higher social status in the society. These are family background, kinship …

4.The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic …

Url:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5901394/

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5.What Is Social Class, and Why Does it Matter? - ThoughtCo

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3 hours ago  · Below I organize the social psychological literature on social class in terms of the impact of class on three types of outcome: thought, encompassing social cognition and …

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