Determinants of Subjective Social Status in Young Adulthood: A Life Course Approach

• In Event: 255 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Paper Session. Field Advantage: What Aspects of Inequality are Sociologists Comparatively Better Equipped to Tackle?

Abstract

To fully study social inequality, we must be able to accurately assess people’s locations in the social world. Most sociological research today uses some combination of markers of objective socioeconomic status (OSS), including income, education, and occupation, which reflect material resources that affect people’s life chances. However, not all socioeconomic disparities are related to access to absolute material resources. Subjective social status (SSS) reflects the socio-physiological worth of one’s perceptions of their status and is thought to encompass one’s cognitive averaging of their OSS markers, and to a lesser extent, psychosocial resource. While others have assessed the associations between OSS measures, psychosocial factors and other sociodemographic characteristics, there is still a great portion of the variance in SSS that remains unexplained. In this paper, I explore predictors of SSS in a nationally representative sample of American young adults using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to make three important contributions to the social stratification literature. First, I examine SSS in young adulthood, for whom objective SES measures may be inappropriate or incredibly fluid. Second, I find that SSS in young adulthood is far more than a reflection of a person`s current and personal OSS. Instead, SSS development is likely an intra- and inter-generational process that incorporates dimensions of OSS across the life course, including parent income and education in adolescence. Finally, I find that contrary to other research, SSS in young adulthood is related to a number of psychosocial resources independent of life course OSS measures.

Author

• Karen Gerken, University of North Carolina