Household Wealth and Adolescents' Social-Emotional Functioning in Schools

• In Event: 32.083 - Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 32.083-9 - Social Class and Experiences With Schooling

Abstract

This study attempts a shift in educational analyses long fixated on the socioeconomic determinants of student test-score performance. We look beyond test scores and SES to investigate adolescents’ social-emotional competencies in relation to wealth. Using fixed-effects and one of the few nationally representative educational datasets that includes any indicators of household assets, we show that wealth influences adolescents’ social-emotional competencies. The effect varies, however, according to how the partitions among the upper class, the middle and working classes, and the poor are conceptualized in relation to wealth. By emphasizing wealth together with social-emotional competencies, our contributions to research rest on the purposeful widening of the overly narrow assumptions about how to measure family resource inputs and the purposes of schools.

Authors

• Robert K. Ream, The University of California - Riverside

• Michael A. Gottfried, University of California - Santa Barbara