What Informs Perception? The Intersection of Poverty and Poverty-Related Experiences in Shaping Low-Income Youth’s Subjective Social Status

• In Event: Intersectional Identities: Exploring How the Meaning and Consequences of Social Class Vary among Children Color

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that adolescents’ perceptions of their social status is positively related to various aspects of health and well-being, independent of objective, family-level indicators of socioeconomic status (SES). Despite this, there is comparatively little known about the life experiences that inform the development of youths’ subjective social status (SSS), or one’s perception of standing or rank relative to others. Prior work has shown objective indicators of SES, such as family income and parental education, to be only modestly correlated with youths’ SSS, suggesting that youths’ perceptions of status are only partially informed by objective indicators of class. Researchers are increasingly recognizing that experiences of income and poverty are multi-faceted and intersecting, reflecting the overlapping systems of oppression that perpetuate inequities and affordances. As such, this work takes an intersectional approach to examining whether multiple aspects of income and poverty, explain variability in different dimensions of youths’ SSS. Specifically, we examine objective measures of income (i.e., lifetime income-to-needs ratio), poverty-related stressors (i.e., financial worry, exposure to violence), and contextual factors (i.e., neighborhood income, neighborhood income inequality, and school-level performance). Importantly, we examine predictors of youths’ SSS within a low-income sample, which is critical for understanding how experiences of poverty can differentially inform perceptions of status.

Data for the present study come from a longitudinal study of predominately low-income, Black and Latinx youth living in Chicago assessed at six waves between 2004 and 2017. Youths’ SSS was assessed at wave six when youth were on average 16-years-old (SD=.77). Youth completed both the Society and School versions of the Subjective Social Status Scale–Youth Version (Goodman et al., 2001) at wave six. Youth were presented with a 10-rung ladder and were asked to rate themselves in terms of status relative to others in society and their school respectively. A total of 422 (70% of the original sample) youth had valid outcome data and make up the analytic sample for this study. Descriptive statistics on all analytic variables are presented in Table 1.

To examine the link from our measures of poverty and poverty-related experiences to youths’ SSS, we estimated two OLS regressions where our set of predictors were regressed on each of our two outcomes. School-level performance was only included in the model predicting School SSS. It is important to note that none of the correlations among our predictors exceed r = .60. All models also adjust for youths’ race/ethnicity, gender, and age. Findings are presented in Table 2. Black youth and younger youth report higher levels of Society SSS compared with Latinx/Other and older youth. Youth who report greater financial worry and youth who have lived in neighborhoods with more income inequality report lower levels of Society SSS. In our model predicting School SSS, we find that youth who report more exposure to violence report lower SSS, while youth attending better performing schools report higher SSS.

Future analyses will test whether the relationships between poverty-related experiences and SSS operate similarly across gender and race/ethnicity.

Authors

• Amanda L. Roy, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Christine Pajunar Li-Grining, Loyola University Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author