Social Positions and Fairness Views on Inequality

We link survey data on Danish people's perceived income positions and fairness views on inequality within various reference groups to administrative records on their reference groups, income histories, and life events. People are, on average, well- informed about the income levels of their reference groups. Yet, lower-ranked respondents in all groups tend to overestimate their own position among others because they believe others' incomes are lower than is the case, while the opposite holds for higher- ranked respondents. Misperceptions of positions in reference groups relate to proximity to other individuals, transparency norms, and visible signals of income. People view inequalities within their co-workers and education groups as significantly more unfair than overall inequality, yet underestimate inequality the most exactly within these groups. Views on the fairness of inequalities are strongly correlated with an individual's current position, move with shocks like unemployment or promotions, and change when experimentally showing people their actual positions. However, the higher perceived unfairness of income differences within co-workers and education groups stays unchanged. The theoretical framework shows that this can have important implications for redistribution policy.

We thank Leonardo D'Amico, Beatrice Ferrario, Martha Fiehn, Ida Maria Hartmann and Isabel Skak Olufsen for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful for comments by seminar participants in the Deaton workshop on Attitudes Towards In- equality and Redistribution, the Selten Lecture in Bonn, IFN in Stockholm, NHH in Bergen, LSE, Princeton, UCSD, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Uppsala, Zurich, and the NBER Public Economics Meetings. We thank three anonymous referees, the editor, Ingvild Alm as, Asger Andersen, Richard Blundell, Alexander Cappelen, Dietmar Fehr, Ernst Fehr, Søren Leth-Petersen, Erzo Luttmer, Andreas Peichl, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Chris Roth, Emmanuel Saez, Julien Senn, David Seim, Krishna Srinivasan, Bertil Tungodden, Andrea Weber, Roberto Weber, and Matthew Weinzierl for feedback and suggestions. The activities of CEBI are financed by the Danish National Research Foundation grant DNRF134. We are also grateful for financial support from the Candys Foundation. The use of the data for this project complies with Danish legislation (persondataforordningen, forordning 2016/679 om persondatabeskyttelse) and has been approved by the Danish Data Protection Agency (File No. 514-0018/2018-2000 at the University of Copenhagen). The project includes a randomized information treatment and was preregistered in the AER RCT Registry (AEARCTR- 0003923). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Download Citation Data

  • November 11, 2020
  • February 3, 2021
  • February 16, 2021
  • November 22, 2021

Non-Technical Summaries

  • Determinants of Views on the Fairness of Inequality Author(s): Kristoffer B. Hvidberg Claus Thustrup Kreiner Stefanie Stantcheva Survey data from Denmark, a very equal society, show that income inequality among individuals with similar education and in similar...

Published Versions

Kristoffer B Hvidberg & Claus T Kreiner & Stefanie Stantcheva, 2023. " Social Positions and Fairness Views on Inequality, " Review of Economic Studies, vol 90(6), pages 3083-3118.

Conferences

More from nber.

In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship  — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .

15th Annual Feldstein Lecture, Mario Draghi, "The Next Flight of the Bumblebee: The Path to Common Fiscal Policy in the Eurozone cover slide

  • Privacy Policy
  • SignUp/Login

Research Method

Home » Position Paper – Example, Format and Writing Guide

Position Paper – Example, Format and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Position Paper

Position Paper

Definition:

Position paper is a written document that presents an argument or stance on a particular issue or topic. It outlines the author’s position on the issue and provides support for that position with evidence and reasoning. Position papers are commonly used in academic settings, such as in Model United Nations conferences or debates, but they can also be used in professional or political contexts.

Position papers typically begin with an introduction that presents the issue and the author’s position on it. The body of the paper then provides evidence and reasoning to support that position, often citing relevant sources and research. The conclusion of the paper summarizes the author’s argument and emphasizes its importance.

Types of Position Paper

There are several types of position papers, including:

  • Advocacy Position Paper : This type of position paper presents an argument in support of a particular issue, policy, or proposal. It seeks to persuade the reader to take a particular action or adopt a particular perspective.
  • Counter-Argument Position Paper: This type of position paper presents an argument against a particular issue, policy, or proposal. It seeks to convince the reader to reject a particular perspective or course of action.
  • Problem-Solution Position Paper : This type of position paper identifies a problem and presents a solution to it. It seeks to convince the reader that the proposed solution is the best course of action to address the identified problem.
  • Comparative Position Paper : This type of position paper compares and contrasts two or more options, policies, or proposals. It seeks to convince the reader that one option is better than the others.
  • Historical Position Paper : This type of position paper examines a historical event, policy, or perspective and presents an argument based on the analysis of the historical context.
  • Interpretive Position Paper : This type of position paper provides an interpretation or analysis of a particular issue, policy, or proposal. It seeks to persuade the reader to adopt a particular perspective or understanding of the topic.
  • Policy Position Paper: This type of position paper outlines a specific policy proposal and presents an argument in support of it. It may also address potential objections to the proposal and offer solutions to address those objections.
  • Value Position Paper: This type of position paper argues for or against a particular value or set of values. It seeks to convince the reader that a particular value or set of values is more important or better than others.
  • Predictive Position Paper : This type of position paper makes predictions about future events or trends and presents an argument for why those predictions are likely to come true. It may also offer suggestions for how to prepare for or respond to those events or trends.
  • Personal Position Paper : This type of position paper presents an individual’s personal perspective or opinion on a particular issue. It may draw on personal experiences or beliefs to support the argument.

Position Paper Format

Here is a format you can follow when writing a position paper:

  • Introduction: The introduction should provide a brief overview of the topic or issue being discussed. It should also provide some background information on the issue and state the purpose of the position paper.
  • Definition of the problem : This section should describe the problem or issue that the position paper addresses. It should explain the causes and effects of the problem and provide evidence to support the claims made.
  • Historical perspective : This section should provide a historical perspective on the issue or problem, outlining how it has evolved over time and what previous attempts have been made to address it.
  • The organization’s stance : This section should present the organization’s stance on the issue or problem. It should provide evidence to support the organization’s position and explain the rationale behind it. This section should also address any counterarguments or alternative perspectives.
  • Proposed solutions: This section should provide proposed solutions or recommendations to address the problem or issue. It should explain how the proposed solutions align with the organization’s stance and provide evidence to support their effectiveness.
  • Conclusion: The conclusion should summarize the organization’s position on the issue or problem and restate the proposed solutions or recommendations. It should also encourage further discussion and action on the issue.
  • References: Include a list of references used to support the claims made in the position paper.

How to Write Position Paper

Here are the steps to write a position paper:

  • Choose your topic: Select a topic that you are passionate about or have knowledge of. It could be related to social, economic, environmental, political, or any other issues.
  • Research: Conduct thorough research on the topic to gather relevant information and supporting evidence. This could include reading scholarly articles, reports, books, and news articles.
  • Define your position: Once you have gathered sufficient information, identify the main arguments and formulate your position. Consider both the pros and cons of the issue.
  • Write an introduction : Start your position paper with a brief introduction that provides some background information on the topic and highlights the key points that you will discuss in the paper.
  • Present your arguments: In the body of your paper, present your arguments in a logical and coherent manner. Each argument should be supported by evidence from your research.
  • Address opposing views : Acknowledge and address the opposing views on the issue. Provide counterarguments that refute these views and explain why your position is more valid.
  • Conclusion : In the conclusion, summarize your main points and reiterate your position on the topic. You can also suggest some solutions or actions that can be taken to address the issue.
  • Edit and proofread : Finally, edit and proofread your position paper to ensure that it is well-written, clear, and free of errors.

Position Paper Example

Position Paper Example structure is as follows:

  • Introduction:
  • A brief overview of the issue
  • A clear statement of the position the paper is taking
  • Background:
  • A detailed explanation of the issue
  • A discussion of the history of the issue
  • An analysis of any previous actions taken on the issue
  • A detailed explanation of the position taken by the paper
  • A discussion of the reasons for the position taken
  • Evidence supporting the position, such as statistics, research, and expert opinions
  • Counterarguments:
  • A discussion of opposing views and arguments
  • A rebuttal of those opposing views and arguments
  • A discussion of why the position taken is more valid than the opposing views
  • Conclusion:
  • A summary of the main points of the paper
  • A call to action or recommendation for action
  • A final statement reinforcing the position taken by the paper
  • References:
  • A list of sources used in the paper, cited in an appropriate citation style

Purpose of Position Paper

Here are some of the most common purposes of position papers:

  • Advocacy: Position papers are often used to promote a particular point of view or to advocate for a specific policy or action.
  • Debate : In a debate, participants are often required to write position papers outlining their argument. These papers help the debaters clarify their position and provide evidence to support their claims.
  • Negotiation : Position papers can be used as part of negotiations to establish each party’s position on a particular issue.
  • Education : Position papers can be used to educate the public, policymakers, and other stakeholders about complex issues by presenting a clear and concise argument supported by evidence.
  • Decision-making : Position papers can be used by decision-makers to make informed decisions about policies, programs, or initiatives based on a well-reasoned argument.
  • Research : Position papers can be used as a starting point for further research on a particular topic or issue.

When to Write Position Paper

Here are some common situations when you might need to write a position paper:

  • Advocacy or lobbying : If you are part of an organization that is advocating for a specific policy change or trying to influence decision-makers, a position paper can help you articulate your organization’s position and provide evidence to support your arguments.
  • Conferences or debates: In academic or professional settings, you may be asked to write a position paper to present your perspective on a particular topic or issue. This can be a useful exercise to help you clarify your thoughts and prepare for a debate or discussion.
  • Public relations: A position paper can also be used as a tool for public relations, to showcase your organization’s expertise and thought leadership on a particular issue.
  • Internal communications: Within an organization, a position paper can be used to communicate a particular stance or policy to employees or stakeholders.

Advantages of Position Paper

There are several advantages to writing a position paper, including:

  • Organizing thoughts : Writing a position paper requires careful consideration of the issue at hand, and the process of organizing thoughts and arguments can help you clarify your own position.
  • Demonstrating expertise: Position papers are often used in academic and professional settings to demonstrate expertise on a particular topic. Writing a well-researched and well-written position paper can help establish your credibility and expertise in a given field.
  • Advocacy: Position papers are often used as a tool for advocacy, whether it’s advocating for a particular policy or for a specific point of view. Position papers can help persuade others to adopt your position on an issue.
  • Facilitating discussion : Position papers can be used to facilitate discussion and debate on a particular issue. By presenting different perspectives on an issue, position papers can help foster dialogue and lead to a better understanding of the topic at hand.
  • Providing a framework for action: Position papers can also be used to provide a framework for action. By outlining specific steps that should be taken to address an issue, a position paper can help guide decision-making and policy development.

About the author

' src=

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

You may also like

What is Literature

What is Literature – Definition, Types, Examples

What is Science

What is Science – Definition, Methods, Types

Academic Paper

Academic Paper – Format, Example and Writing...

Evolution

Evolution – Definition, Types and Example

What is Art

What is Art – Definition, Types, Examples

Theory

Theory – Definition, Types and Examples

U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

  • Publications
  • Account settings
  • Advanced Search
  • Journal List
  • Wiley-Blackwell Online Open

Logo of blackwellopen

The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour

Antony s. r. manstead.

1 Cardiff University, UK

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.

We are all middle class now. John Prescott, former Labour Deputy Prime Minister, 1997
Class is a Communist concept. It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another. Margaret Thatcher, former Conservative Prime Minister, 1992

One of the ironies of modern Western societies, with their emphasis on meritocratic values that promote the notion that people can achieve what they want if they have enough talent and are prepared to work hard, is that the divisions between social classes are becoming wider, not narrower. In the United Kingdom, for example, figures from the Equality Trust ( 2017 ) show that the top one‐fifth of households have 40% of national income, whereas the bottom one‐fifth have just 8%. These figures are based on 2012 data. Between 1938 and 1979, income inequality in the United Kingdom did reduce to some extent, but in subsequent decades, this process has reversed. Between 1979 and 2009/2010, the top 10% of the population increased its share of national income from 21% to 31%, whereas the share received by the bottom 10% fell from 4% to 1%. Wealth inequality is even starker than income inequality. Figures from the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2014 ) show that in the period 2012–2014, the wealthiest 10% of households in Great Britain owned 45% of household wealth, whereas the least wealthy 50% of households owned <9%. How can these very large divisions in material income and wealth be reconciled with the view that the class structure that used to prevail in the United Kingdom until at least the mid‐20th century is no longer relevant, because the traditional working class has ‘disappeared’, as asserted by John Prescott in one of the opening quotes, and reflected in the thesis of embourgeoisement analysed by Goldthorpe and Lockwood ( 1963 )? More pertinently for the present article, what implications do these changing patterns of wealth and income distribution have for class identity, social cognition, and social behaviour?

The first point to address concerns the supposed disappearance of the class system. As recent sociological research has conclusively shown, the class system in the United Kingdom is very much still in existence, albeit in a way that differs from the more traditional forms that were based primarily on occupation. In one of the more comprehensive recent studies, Savage et al . ( 2013 ) analysed the results of a large survey of social class in the United Kingdom, the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey, which involved 161,400 web respondents, along with the results of a nationally representative sample survey. Using latent class analysis, the authors identified seven classes, ranging from an ‘elite’, with an average annual household income of £89,000, to a ‘precariat’ with an average annual household income of £8,000. Among the many interesting results is the fact that the ‘traditional working‐class’ category formed only 14% of the population. This undoubtedly reflects the impact of de‐industrialization and is almost certainly the basis of the widely held view that the ‘old’ class system in the United Kingdom no longer applies. As Savage et al .'s research clearly shows, the old class system has been reconfigured as a result of economic and political developments, but it is patently true that the members of the different classes identified by these researchers inhabit worlds that rarely intersect, let alone overlap. The research by Savage et al . revealed that the differences between the social classes they identified extended beyond differences in financial circumstances. There were also marked differences in social and cultural capital, as indexed by size of social network and extent of engagement with different cultural activities, respectively. From a social psychological perspective, it seems likely that growing up and living under such different social and economic contexts would have a considerable impact on people's thoughts, feelings and behaviours. The central aim of this article was to examine the nature of this impact.

One interesting reflection of the complicated ways in which objective and subjective indicators of social class intersect can be found in an analysis of data from the British Social Attitudes survey (Evans & Mellon, 2016 ). Despite the fact that there has been a dramatic decline in traditional working‐class occupations, large numbers of UK citizens still describe themselves as being ‘working class’. Overall, around 60% of respondents define themselves as working class, and the proportion of people who do so has hardly changed during the past 33 years. One might reasonably ask whether and how much it matters that many people whose occupational status suggests that they are middle class describe themselves as working class. Evans and Mellon ( 2016 ) show quite persuasively that this self‐identification does matter. In all occupational classes other than managerial and professional, whether respondents identified themselves as working class or middle class made a substantial difference to their political attitudes, with those identifying as working class being less likely to be classed as right‐wing. No wonder Margaret Thatcher was keen to dispense with the concept of class, as evidenced by the quotation at the start of this paper. Moreover, self‐identification as working class was significantly associated with social attitudes in all occupational classes. For example, these respondents were more likely to have authoritarian attitudes and less likely to be in favour of immigration, a point I will return to later. It is clear from this research that subjective class identity is linked to quite marked differences in socio‐political attitudes.

A note on terminology

In what follows, I will refer to a set of concepts that are related but by no means interchangeable. As we have already seen, there is a distinction to be drawn between objective and subjective indicators of social class. In Marxist terms, class is defined objectively in terms of one's relationship to the means of production. You either have ownership of the means of production, in which case you belong to the bourgeoisie, or you sell your labour, in which case you belong to the proletariat, and there is a clear qualitative difference between the two classes. This worked well when most people could be classified either as owners or as workers. As we have seen, such an approach has become harder to sustain in an era when traditional occupations have been shrinking or have already disappeared, a sizeable middle‐class of managers and professionals has emerged, and class divisions are based on wealth and social and cultural capital.

An alternative approach is one that focuses on quantitative differences in socioeconomic status (SES), which is generally defined in terms of an individual's economic position and educational attainment, relative to others, as well as his or her occupation. As will be shown below, when people are asked about their identities, they think more readily in terms of SES than in terms of social class. This is probably because they have a reasonable sense of where they stand, relative to others, in terms of economic factors and educational attainment, and perhaps recognize that traditional boundaries between social classes have become less distinct. For these reasons, much of the social psychological literature on social class has focused on SES as indexed by income and educational attainment, and/or on subjective social class, rather than social class defined in terms of relationship to the means of production. For present purposes, the terms ‘working class’, which tends to be used more by European researchers, and ‘lower class’, which tends to be used by US researchers, are used interchangeably. Similarly, the terms ‘middle class’ and ‘upper class’ will be used interchangeably, despite the different connotations of the latter term in the United States and in Europe, where it tends to be reserved for members of the land‐owning aristocracy. A final point about terminology concerns ‘ideology’, which will here be used to refer to a set of beliefs, norms and values, examples being the meritocratic ideology that pervades most education systems and the (related) ideology of social mobility that is prominent in the United States.

Socioeconomic status and identity

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. Easterbrook, Kuppens, and Manstead ( 2018 ) analysed data from two large, representative samples of British adults and showed that respondents placed high subjective importance on their identities that are indicative of SES. Indeed, they attached at least as much importance to their SES identities as they did to identities (such as ethnicity or gender) more commonly studied by self and identity researchers. Easterbrook and colleagues also showed that objective indicators of a person's SES were robust and powerful predictors of the importance they placed on different types of identities within their self‐concepts: Those with higher SES attached more importance to identities that are indicative of their SES position, but less importance on identities that are rooted in basic demographics or related to their sociocultural orientation (and vice versa).

To arrive at these conclusions, Easterbook and colleagues analysed data from two large British surveys: The Citizenship Survey (CS; Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012 ); and Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study (USS; Buck & McFall, 2012 ). The CS is a (now discontinued) biannual survey of a regionally representative sample of around 10,000 adults in England and Wales, with an ethnic minority boost sample of around 5,000. The researchers analysed the most recent data, collected via interviews in 2010–2011. The USS is an annual longitudinal household panel survey that began in 2009. Easterbrook and colleagues analysed Wave 5 (2013–2014), the more recent of the two waves in which the majority of respondents answered questions relevant to class and other social identities.

Both the CS and the USS included a question about the extent to which respondents incorporated different identities into their sense of self. Respondents were asked how important these identities were ‘to your sense of who you are’. The CS included a broad range of identities, including profession, ethnic background, family, gender, age/life stage, income and education. The USS included a shorter list of identities, including profession, education, ethnic background, family, gender and age/life stage. When the responses to these questions were factor analysed, Easterbrook and colleagues found three factors that were common to the two datasets: SES‐based identities (e.g., income), basic‐demographic identities (e.g., age), and identities based on sociocultural orientation (e.g., ethnic background). In both datasets, the importance of each of these three identities was systematically related to objective indicators of the respondents’ SES: As the respondent's SES increased, the subjective importance of SES‐related identities increased, whereas the importance of basic‐demographic and (to a lesser extent) sociocultural identities decreased. Interestingly, these findings echo those of a qualitative, interview‐based study conducted with American college students: Aries and Seider ( 2007 ) found that affluent respondents were more likely than their less affluent counterparts to acknowledge the importance of social class in shaping their identities. As the researchers put it, ‘The affluent students were well aware of the educational benefits that had accrued from their economically privileged status and of the opportunities that they had to travel and pursue their interests. The lower‐income students were more likely to downplay class in their conception of their own identities than were the affluent students’ (p. 151).

Thus, despite SES receiving relatively scant attention from self and identity researchers, there is converging quantitative and qualitative evidence that SES plays an important role in structuring the self‐concept.

Contexts that shape self‐construal: Home, school, and work

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.

The idea that schools are contexts in which social class inequalities are reinforced may initially seem puzzling, given that schools are supposed to be meritocratic environments in which achievement is shaped by ability and effort, rather than by any advantage conferred by class background. 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.

Subjective social class

Stephens et al .’s ( 2014 ) conceptualization of culture‐specific selves that vary as a function of social class is compatible with the ‘subjective social rank’ argument advanced by Kraus, Piff, and Keltner ( 2011 ). The latter authors argue that the differences in material resources available to working‐ and middle‐class people create cultural identities that are based on subjective perceptions of social rank in relation to others. These perceptions are based on distinctive patterns of observable behaviour arising from differences in wealth, education, and occupation. ‘To the extent that these patterns of behavior are both observable and reliably associated with individual wealth, occupational prestige, and education, they become potential signals to others of a person's social class’ (Kraus et al ., 2011 , p. 246). Among the signals of social class is non‐verbal behaviour. Kraus and Keltner ( 2009 ) studied non‐verbal behaviour in pairs of people from different social class backgrounds and found that whereas upper‐class individuals were more disengaged non‐verbally, lower‐class individuals exhibited more socially engaged eye contact, head nods, and laughter. Furthermore, when naïve observers were shown 60‐s excerpts of these interactions, they used these disengaged versus engaged non‐verbal behavioural styles to make judgements of the educational and income backgrounds of the people they had seen with above‐chance accuracy. In other words, social class differences are reflected in social signals, and these signals can be used by individuals to assess their subjective social rank. By comparing their wealth, education, occupation, aesthetic tastes, and behaviour with those of others, individuals can determine where they stand in the social hierarchy, and this subjective social rank then shapes other aspects of their social behaviour. More recent research has confirmed these findings. Becker, Kraus, and Rheinschmidt‐Same ( 2017 ) found that people's social class could be judged with above‐chance accuracy from uploaded Facebook photographs, while Kraus, Park, and Tan ( 2017 ) found that when Americans were asked to judge a speaker's social class from just seven spoken words, the accuracy of their judgments was again above chance.

The fact that there are behavioural signals of social class also opens up the potential for others to hold prejudiced attitudes and to engage in discriminatory behaviour towards those from a lower social class, although Kraus et al . ( 2011 ) focus is on how the social comparison process affects the self‐perception of social rank, and how this in turn affects other aspects of social behaviour. These authors argue that subjective social rank ‘exerts broad influences on thought, emotion, and social behavior independently of the substance of objective social class’ (p. 248). The relation between objective and subjective social class is an interesting issue in its own right. Objective social class is generally operationalized in terms of wealth and income, educational attainment, and occupation. These are the three ‘gateway contexts’ identified by Stephens et al . ( 2014 ). As argued by them, these contexts have a powerful influence on individual cognition and behaviour who operate within them, but they do not fully determine how individuals developing and living in these contexts think, feel, and act. Likewise, there will be circumstances in which individuals who objectively are, say, middle‐class construe themselves as having low subjective social rank as a result of the context in which they live.

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.

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 attitudes; emotion , with a focus on moral emotions and prosocial behaviour; and behaviour in high‐prestige educational and workplace settings. I will show that these impacts of social class are consistent with the view that the different construals of the self that are fostered by growing up in low versus high social class contexts have lasting psychological consequences.

Social cognition and attitudes

The ways in which these differences in self‐construal shape social cognition have been synthesized into a theoretical model by Kraus, Piff, Mendoza‐Denton, Rheinschmidt, and Keltner ( 2012 ). This model is shown in Figure  1 . They characterize the way lower‐class individuals think about the social environment as ‘contextualism’, meaning a psychological orientation that is motivated by the need to deal with external constraints and threats; and the way that upper‐class people think about the social environment as ‘solipsism’, meaning an orientation that is motivated by internal states such as emotion and by personal goals. One way in which these different orientations manifest themselves is in differences in responses to threat. The premise here is that lower‐class contexts are objectively characterized by greater levels of threat, as reflected in less security in employment, housing, personal safety, and health. These chronic threats foster the development of a ‘threat detection system’, with the result that people who grow up in such environments have a heightened vigilance to threat.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is BJSO-57-267-g001.jpg

Model of the way in which middle‐ and working‐class contexts shape social cognition, as proposed by Kraus et al . ( 2012 ). From Kraus et al . ( 2012 ), published by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Another important difference between the contextualist lower‐class orientation and the solipsistic upper‐class one, according to Kraus et al . ( 2012 ), is in perceived control. Perceived control is closely related to other key psychological constructs, such as attributions. The evidence shows very clearly that those with lower subjective social class are also lower in their sense of personal control, and it also suggests that this reduced sense of control is related to a preference for situational (rather than dispositional) attributions for a range of social phenomena, including social inequality. The logic connecting social class to perceptions of control is straightforward: Those who grow up in middle‐ or upper‐class environments are likely to have more material and psychological resources available to them, and as a result have stronger beliefs about the extent to which they can shape their own social outcomes; by contrast, those who grow up in lower‐class environments are likely to have fewer resources available to them, and as a result have weaker beliefs about their ability to control their outcomes. There is good empirical support for these linkages. In a series of four studies, Kraus, Piff, and Keltner ( 2009 ) found that, by comparison with their higher subjective social class counterparts, lower subjective social class individuals (1) reported lower perceived control and (2) were more likely to explain various phenomena, ranging from income inequality to broader social outcomes like getting into medical school, contracting HIV, or being obese, as caused by external factors, ones that are beyond the control of the individual. Moreover, consistent with the authors’ reasoning, there was a significant indirect effect of subjective social class on the tendency to see phenomena as caused by external factors, via perceived control.

Another important social cognition measure in relation to social class is prejudice. There are two aspects of prejudice in this context. One is prejudice against people of a different class than one's own and especially attitudes towards those who are poor or unemployed; the other is the degree to which people's prejudiced attitudes about other social groups are associated with their own social class. Regarding attitudes to people who belong to a different social class, the UK evidence clearly shows that attitudes to poverty have changed over the last three decades, in that there is a rising trend for people to believe that those who live in need do so because of a lack of willpower, or because of laziness, accompanied by a corresponding decline in the belief that people live in need because of societal injustice (Clery, Lee, & Kunz, 2013 ). Interestingly, in their analysis of British Social Attitudes data over a period of 28 years, Clery et al . conclude that ‘there are no clear patterns of change in the views of different social classes, suggesting changing economic circumstances exert an impact on attitudes to poverty across society, not just among those most likely to be affected by them’ (p. 18). Given the changing attitudes to poverty, it is unsurprising to find that public attitudes to welfare spending and to redistributive taxation have also changed in a way that reflects less sympathy for those living in poverty. For example, attitudes to benefits for the unemployed have changed sharply in the United Kingdom since 1997, when a majority of respondents still believed that benefits were too low. By 2008, an overwhelming majority of respondents believed that these benefits were too high (Taylor‐Gooby, 2013 ). The way in which economic austerity has affected attitudes to these issues was the subject of qualitative research conducted by Valentine ( 2014 ). Interviews with 90 people in northern England, drawn from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds, showed that many respondents believed that unemployment is due to personal, rather than structural, failings, and that it is a ‘lifestyle choice’, leading interviewees to blame the unemployed for their lack of work and to have negative attitudes to welfare provision. Valentine ( 2014 , p. 2) observed that ‘a moralised sense of poverty as the result of individual choice, rather than structural disadvantage and inequality, was in evidence across the majority of respondents’, and that ‘Negative attitudes to welfare provision were identified across a variety of social positions and were not exclusively reserved to individuals from either working class or middle class backgrounds’.

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 ). Indeed, there is no shortage of evidence showing that working‐class white people do express more negative attitudes towards these groups. One explanation for this association is that working‐class people tend to be more authoritarian – a view that can be traced back to the early research on the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel‐Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950 ). Recent research providing evidence in favour of this view is reported by Carvacho et al . ( 2013 ). Using a combination of cross‐sectional surveys and longitudinal studies conducted in Europe and Chile, these authors focused on the role of ideological attitudes, in the shape of right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1998 ) and social dominance orientation (SDO; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 ), as mediators of the relation between social class and prejudice. To test their predictions, the researchers analysed four public opinion datasets: one based on eight representative samples in Germany; a second based on representative samples from four European countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands); a third based on longitudinal research in Germany; and a fourth based on longitudinal research in Chile. Consistent with previous research, the researchers found that income and education, the two indices of social class that they used, predicted higher scores on a range of measures of prejudice, such that lower income and education were associated with greater prejudice – although education proved to be a more consistently significant predictor of prejudice than income did. RWA and SDO were negatively associated with income and education, such that higher scores on income and education predicted lower scores on RWA and SDO. Finally, there was also evidence consistent with the mediation hypothesis: The associations between income and education, on the one hand, and measures of prejudice, on the other, were often (but not always) mediated by SDO and (more consistently) RWA. Carvacho and colleagues concluded that ‘the working class seems to develop and reproduce an ideological configuration that is generally well suited for legitimating the social system’ (p. 283).

Indeed, a theme that emerges from research on social class and attitudes is that ideological factors have a powerful influence on attitudes. The neoliberal ideology that has dominated political discourse in most Western, industrialized societies in the past three decades has influenced attitudes to such an extent that even supporters of left‐of‐centre political parties, such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, regard poverty as arising from individual factors and tend to hold negative beliefs about the level of welfare benefits for the unemployed. Such attitudes are shared to a perhaps surprising extent by working‐class people (Clery et al ., 2013 ) and, as we have seen, the research by Carvacho et al . ( 2013 ) suggests that working‐class people endorse ideologies that endorse and preserve a social system that materially disadvantages them.

The notion that people who are disadvantaged by a social system are especially likely to support it is known as the ‘system justification hypothesis’, which holds that ‘people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it’ (Jost, Pelham, Sheldon, & Sullivan, 2003 , p. 13). The rationale for this prediction derives in part from cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957 ), the idea being that it is psychologically inconsistent to experience oppression but not to protest against the system that causes it. One way to reduce the resulting dissonance is to support the system even more strongly, in the same way that those who have to go through an unpleasant initiation rite in order to join a group or organization become more strongly committed to it.

Two large‐scale studies of survey data (Brandt, 2013 ; Caricati, 2017 ) have cast considerable doubt on the validity of this hypothesis, showing that any tendency for people who are at the bottom of a social system to be more likely to support the system than are their advantaged counterparts is, at best, far from robust. Moreover, it has been argued that there is in any case a basic theoretical inconsistency between system justification theory and cognitive dissonance theory (Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, 2016 ). However, the fact that working‐class people may not be more supportive of the capitalist system than their middle‐ and upper‐class counterparts does not mean that they do not support the system. Thus, the importance of Carvacho et al .'s ( 2013 ) findings is not necessarily undermined by the results reported by Brandt ( 2013 ) and Caricati ( 2017 ). Being willing to legitimate the system is not the same thing as having a stronger tendency to do this than people who derive greater advantages from the system.

The finding that there is an association between social class and prejudice has also been explained in terms of economic threat. The idea here is that members of ethnic minorities and immigrants also tend to be low in social status and are therefore more likely to be competing with working‐class people than with middle‐class people for jobs, housing, and other services. A strong way to test the economic threat explanation would be to assess whether higher‐class people are prejudiced when confronted with immigrants who are highly educated and likely to be competing with them for access to employment and housing. Such a test was conducted by Kuppens, Spears, Manstead, and Tausch ( 2018 ). These researchers examined whether more highly educated participants would express negative attitudes towards highly educated immigrants, especially when threat to the respondents’ own jobs was made salient, either by drawing attention to the negative economic outlook or by subtly implying that the respondents’ own qualifications might be insufficient in the current job market. Consistent with the economic threat hypothesis, a series of experimental studies with student participants in different European countries showed that attitudes to immigrants were most negative when the immigrants also had a university education.

The same researchers also combined US census data with American National Election Study survey data to examine whether symbolic racism was higher in areas where there was a higher number of Blacks with a similar education to that of the White participants. In areas where Blacks were on average less educated, a higher number Blacks was associated with more symbolic racism among Whites who had less education, but in areas where Blacks were on average highly educated, a higher number of Blacks was associated with more symbolic racism on the part of highly educated White people. Again, these findings are consistent with the view that prejudice arises from economic threat.

Research reported by Jetten, Mols, Healy, and Spears ( 2017 ) is also relevant to this issue. These authors examined how economic instability affects low‐SES and high‐SES people. Unsurprisingly, they found that collective angst was higher among low‐SES participants. However, they also found that high‐SES participants expressed anxiety when they were presented with information suggesting that there was high economic instability, that is, that the ‘economic bubble’ might be about to burst. Moreover, they were more likely to oppose immigration when economic instability was said to be high, rather than low. These results reflect the fact that high‐SES people have a lot to lose in times of economic crisis, and that this ‘fear of falling’ is associated with opposition to immigration.

Together, these results provide good support for an explanation of the association between social class and prejudice in terms of differential threat to the group (see also Brandt & Henry, 2012 ; Brandt & Van Tongeren, 2017 ). Ethnic minorities and immigrants typically pose most threat to the economic well‐being of working‐class people who have low educational qualifications, and this provides the basis for the observation that working‐class people are more likely to be prejudiced. The fact that higher‐educated and high‐SES people express negative views towards ethnic minorities and immigrants when their economic well‐being is threatened shows that it is perceived threat to one's group's interests that underpins this prejudice. It is also worth noting that the perception of threat to a group's economic interests is likely to be greater during times of economic recession.

Emotion and prosocial behaviour

A strong theme emerging from research investigating the relation between social class and emotion is that lower‐class individuals score more highly on measures of empathy. The rationale for expecting such a link is that because lower‐class individuals are more inclined to explain events in terms of external factors, they should be more sensitive to the ways in which external events shape the emotions of others, and therefore better at judging other people's emotions. A complementary rationale is that the tendency for lower social class individuals to be more socially engaged and to have more interdependent social relationships should result in greater awareness of the emotions experienced by others. This reasoning was tested in three studies reported by Kraus, Côté, and Keltner ( 2010 ).

In the first of these studies, the authors examined the relation between educational attainment (a proxy for social class) and scores on the emotion recognition subscale of the Mayer‐Salovey‐Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002 ). High‐school‐educated participants attained a higher score than did their college‐educated counterparts. In a second study, pairs of participants took part in a hypothetical job interview in which an experimenter asked each of them a set of standard questions. This interaction provided the basis for the measure of empathic accuracy, in that each participant was asked to rate both their own emotions and their partner's emotions during the interview. Subjective social class was again related to empathic accuracy, with lower‐class participants achieving a higher score. Moreover, lower‐class participants were more inclined to explain decisions they made in terms of situational rather than dispositional factors, and the relation between subjective social class and empathy was found to be mediated by this tendency to explain decisions in terms of situational factors. The researchers conducted a third study in which they manipulated subjective social class. This time they assessed empathic accuracy using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001 ). Participants who were temporarily induced to experience lower social class were better at recognizing emotions from the subtle cues available from the eye region of the face.

These findings are compatible with the view that lower social class individuals are more sensitive to contextual variation and more inclined to explain events in situational terms. However, some aspects of the results are quite surprising. For example, there seems to be no compelling reason to predict that greater sensitivity to contextual variation would be helpful in judging static facial expressions, which were the stimuli in Studies 1 and 3 of Kraus et al .'s ( 2010 ) research. Thus, the relation between social class and emotion recognition in these studies would seem to depend on the notion that the greater interdependence that is characteristic of lower‐class social environments fosters greater experience with, and therefore knowledge of, the relation between facial movement and subjective emotion, although it still seems surprising that a temporary induction of lower subjective social class, as used in Study 3, should elicit the same effect as extensive real‐life experience of inhabiting lower‐class environments.

If lower‐class individuals are more empathic than their higher‐class counterparts, and are therefore better at recognizing the distress or need of others, this is likely to influence their behaviour in settings where people are distressed and/or in need. This, indeed, is what the evidence suggests. In a series of four studies, Piff, Kraus, Côté, Cheng, and Keltner ( 2010 ) found a consistent tendency for higher‐class individuals to be less inclined to help others than were their lower‐class counterparts. In Study 1, participants low in subjective social class made larger allocations in a dictator game (a game where you are free to allocate as much or as little of a resource to another person as you want) played with an anonymous other than did participants high in subjective social class. In Study 2, subjective social class was manipulated by asking participants to compare themselves to people either at the very top or very bottom of the status hierarchy ladder, the idea being that subjective social class should be lower for those making upward comparisons and higher for those making downward comparisons. Prosocial behaviour was measured by asking participants to indicate the percentage of income that people should spend on a variety of goods and services, one of which was charitable donations. Participants who were induced to experience lower subjective social class indicated that a greater percentage of people's annual salary should be spent on charitable donations compared to participants who were induced to experience higher subjective social class. In Study 3, the researchers used a combination of educational attainment and household income to assess social class and used social value orientation (Van Lange, De Bruin, Otten, & Joireman, 1997 ) as a measure of egalitarian values. These two variables were used to predict behaviour in a trust game. Consistent with predictions, lower‐class participants showed greater trust in their anonymous partner than did their higher‐class counterparts, and this relation was mediated by egalitarian values. In their final study, the researchers manipulated compassion by asking participants in the compassion condition to view a 46‐s video about child poverty. Higher‐ and lower‐class participants were then given the chance to help someone in need. The researchers predicted that helping would only be moderated by compassion among higher‐class participants, on the grounds that lower‐class participants would already be disposed to help, and the results were consistent with this prediction. Overall, these four studies are consistent in showing that, relative to higher‐class people, lower‐class people are more generous, support charity to a greater extent, are more trusting towards a stranger, and more likely to help a person in distress.

The reliability of this finding has been called into question by Korndörfer, Egloff, and Schmukle ( 2015 ), who found contrary evidence in a series of studies. One way to resolve these apparently discrepant findings is to argue, as Kraus and Callaghan ( 2016 ) did, that the relation between social class and prosocial behaviour is moderated by a number of factors, including whether the context is a public or private one. To test this idea, Kraus and Callaghan ( 2016 ) conducted a series of studies in which they manipulated whether donations made to an anonymous other in a dictator game were made in a private or public context. In the private context, the donor remained anonymous. In the public context, the donor's name and city of residence were announced, along with the donation. Lower‐class participants were more generous in private than in public, whereas the reverse was true for higher‐class participants. Interestingly, higher‐class participants were more likely to expect to feel proud about acting prosocially, and this difference in anticipated pride mediated the effect of social class on the difference between public and private donations.

The fact that lower‐class people have been found to hold more egalitarian values and to be more likely to help regardless of compassion level suggests that it is the greater resources of higher‐class participants that makes them more selfish and therefore less likely to help others. This ‘selfishness’ account of the social class effect on prosocial behaviour is supported by another series of studies reported by Piff, Stancato, Côté, Mendoza‐Denton, and Keltner ( 2012 ), who found that, relative to lower‐class individuals, higher‐class people were more likely to show unethical decision‐making tendencies, to take valued goods from others, to lie in a negotiation, to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and to endorse unethical behaviour at work. There was also evidence that these unethical tendencies were partly accounted for by more favourable attitudes towards greed among higher‐class people. Later research shows that the relation between social class and unethical behaviour is moderated by whether the behaviour benefits the self or others. Dubois, Rucker, and Galinsky ( 2015 ) varied who benefited from unethical behaviour and showed that the previously reported tendency for higher‐class people to make more unethical decisions was only observed when the outcome was beneficial to the self. These findings are consistent with the view that the greater resources enjoyed by higher‐class individuals result in a stronger focus on the self and a reduced concern for the welfare of others.

Interestingly, this stronger self‐focus and lesser concern for others’ welfare on the part of higher‐class people are more evident in contexts characterized by high economic inequality. This was shown by Côté, House, and Willer ( 2015 ), who analysed results from a nationally representative US survey and showed that higher‐income respondents were only less generous in the offers they made to an anonymous other in a dictator game than their lower‐income counterparts in areas that were high in economic inequality, as reflected in the Gini coefficient. Indeed, in low inequality areas, there was evidence that higher‐income respondents were more generous than their lower‐income counterparts. To test the causality of this differential association between income and generosity in high and low inequality areas, the authors conducted an experiment in which participants were led to believe that their home state was characterized by high or low degree of economic inequality and then played a dictator game with an anonymous other. High‐income participants were less generous than their low‐income counterparts in the high inequality condition but not in the low inequality condition.

A possible issue with Côté et al . ( 2015 ) research in the current context is that it focuses on income rather than class. Although these variables are clearly connected, class is generally thought to be indexed by more than income. The research nevertheless suggests that economic inequality plays a key role in shaping the attitudes and behaviours of higher‐class individuals. There are at least three (not mutually exclusive) explanations for this influence of inequality. One is that inequality increases the sense of entitlement in higher‐class people, because they engage more often in downward social comparisons. Another is that higher‐class people may be more concerned about losing their privileged position in society if they perceive a large gap between the rich and the poor. A final explanation is that higher‐class people may be more highly motivated to justify their privileged position in society when the gap between rich and poor is a large one. Whichever of these explanations is correct – and they may all be to some extent – the fact that prosocial behaviour on the part of higher‐class individuals decreases under conditions of high economic inequality is important, given that the United States is one of the most economically unequal societies in the industrialized world. In unequal societies, then, it seems safe to conclude that on average, higher‐class individuals are less likely than their lower‐class counterparts to behave prosocially, especially where the prosocial behaviour is not public in nature.

Universities and workplaces

The selective nature of higher education (HE), involving economic and/or qualification requirements to gain entry, makes a university a high‐status context. Working‐class people seeking to attain university‐level qualifications are therefore faced with working in an environment in which they may feel out of place. Highly selective universities such as Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, or Harvard, Stanford, and Yale in the United States, are especially likely to appear to be high in status and therefore out of reach. Indeed, the proportion of working‐class students at Oxford and Cambridge is strikingly low. According to the UK's Higher Education Statistics Agency , the percentage of students at Oxford and Cambridge who were from routine/manual occupational backgrounds was 11.5 and 12.6, respectively, in the academic year 2008/9. This compares with an ONS figure of 37% of all people aged between 16 and 63 in the United Kingdom being classified with such backgrounds. The figures for Oxford and Cambridge are extreme, but they illustrate a more general phenomenon, both in the United Kingdom and internationally: students at elite, research‐led universities are more likely to come from middle‐ and upper‐class backgrounds than from working‐class backgrounds (Jerrim, 2013 ).

The reasons for the very low representation of working‐class students at these elite institutions are complex (Chowdry, Crawford, Dearden, Goodman, & Vignoles, 2013 ), but at least one factor is that many working‐class students do not consider applying because they do not see themselves as feeling at home there. They see a mismatch between the identity conferred by their social backgrounds and the identity they associate with being a student at an elite university. This is evident from ethnographic research. For example, Reay, Crozier, and Clayton ( 2010 ) interviewed students from working‐class backgrounds who were attending one of four HE institutions, including an elite university (named Southern in the report). A student at Southern said this about her mother's reaction to her attending this elite university: ‘I don't think my mother really approves of me going to Southern. It's not what her daughter should be doing so I don't really mention it when I go home. It's kind of uncomfortable to talk about it’ (p. 116). In a separate paper, Reay, Crozier, and Clayton ( 2009 ) focus on the nine students attending Southern, examining whether these students felt like ‘fish out of water’. Indeed, there was evidence of difficulty in adjusting to the new environment, both socially and academically. One student said, ‘I wasn't keen on Southern as a place and all my preconceptions were “Oh, it's full of posh boarding school types”. And it was all true … it was a bit of a culture shock’ (p. 1111), while another said, ‘If you were the best at your secondary school … you're certainly not going to be the best here’ (p. 1112). A similar picture emerges from research in Canada by Lehmann ( 2009 , 2013 ), who interviewed working‐class students attending a research‐intensive university, and found that the students experienced uncomfortable conflicts between their new identities as university students and the ties they had with family members and non‐student friends.

Such is the reputation of elite, research‐intensive universities that working‐class high‐school students are unlikely to imagine themselves attending such institutions, even if they are academically able. Perceptions of these universities as elitist are likely to deter such students from applying. Evidence of this deterrence comes from research conducted by Nieuwenhuis, Easterbrook, and Manstead ( 2018 ). They report two studies in which 16‐ to 18‐year‐old secondary school students in the United Kingdom were asked about the universities they intended to apply to. The studies were designed to test the theoretical model shown in Figure  2 , which was influenced by prior work on the role of identity compatibility conducted by Jetten, Iyer, Tsivrikos, and Young ( 2008 ). According to the model in Figure  2 , SES influences university choice partly through its impact on perceived identity compatibility and anticipated acceptance at low‐ and high‐status universities.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is BJSO-57-267-g002.jpg

Theoretical model of the way in which the socioeconomic status ( SES ) influences application to high‐status universities as a result of social identity factors and academic achievement, as proposed by Nieuwenhuis et al . ( 2018 ).

In the first study conducted by Nieuwenhuis and colleagues, students who were 6 months away from making their university applications responded to questions about their perceptions of two universities, one a research‐intensive, selective university (SU), the other a less selective university (LSU). Both universities were located in the same geographical region, not far from the schools where the participants were recruited. In the second study, students who were 6 weeks away from making their university applications responded to similar questions, but this time about three universities in the region, two of which were the same as those in Study 1, while the third was a highly selective institution (HSU). The questions put to respondents measured their perceptions of identity compatibility (e.g., consistency between family background and decision to go to university) and anticipated acceptance (e.g., anticipated identification with students at the university in question). Measures of parental education and academic achievement in previous examinations were taken, as well as the three universities to which they would most like to apply, which were scored in accordance with a published national league table.

In both studies, it was found that relatively disadvantaged students (whose parents had low levels of educational attainment) scored lower on identity compatibility and that low scores on identity compatibility were associated with lower anticipated acceptance at the SU (Study 1) or at the HSU (Study 2). These anticipated acceptance scores, in turn, predicted the type of university to which participants wanted to apply, with those who anticipated feeling accepted at more selective universities being more likely to apply to higher status universities. All of these relations were significant while controlling for academic achievement. Together, the results of these studies show that perceptions of acceptance at different types of university are associated with HE choices independently of students’ academic ability. This helps to explain why highly able students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to settle for less prestigious universities.

Alternatively, working‐class students may opt out of HE altogether. Hutchings and Archer ( 2001 ) interviewed young working‐class people who were not participating in HE and found that a key reason for their non‐participation was a perception that the kinds of HE institutions that were realistically available to them were second‐rate: ‘[O]ur respondents constructed two very different pictures of HE. One was of Oxbridge and campus universities, pleasant environments in which middle‐class students … can look forward to achieving prestigious degrees and careers. The second construction was of rather unattractive buildings in which “skint” working‐class students … have to work hard under considerable pressure, combining study with a job and having little time for social life. This second picture was the sort of HE that our respondents generally talked about as available to them, and they saw it as inferior to ‘real’ HE’ (p. 87).

Despite the deterrent effect of perceived identity incompatibility and lack of psychological fit, some working‐class students do gain entry to high‐status universities. Once there, they are confronted with the same issues of fit. Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, and Covarrubias ( 2012 ) describe this as ‘cultural mismatch’, arguing that the interdependent norms that characterize the working‐class backgrounds of most first‐generation college students in the United States do not match the middle‐class independent norms that prevail in universities offering 4‐year degrees and that this mismatch leads to greater discomfort and poorer academic performance. Their cultural mismatch model is summarized in Figure  3 .

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is BJSO-57-267-g003.jpg

Model of cultural mismatch proposed by Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, et al . ( 2012 ). The mismatch is between first‐generation college students’ norms, which are more interdependent than those of continuing‐generation students, and the norms of independence that prevail in universities. From Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, et al . ( 2012 ), published by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

To test this model, Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, et al . ( 2012 ) surveyed university administrators at the top 50 national universities and the top 25 liberal arts colleges. The majority of the 261 respondents were deans. They were asked to respond to items expressing interdependent (e.g., learn to work together with others) or independent (e.g., learn to express oneself) norms, selecting those that characterized their institution's culture or choosing statements reflecting what was more often emphasized by the institution. More than 70% of the respondents chose items reflecting a greater emphasis on independence than on interdependence. Similar results were found in a follow‐up study involving 50 administrators at second‐tier universities and liberal arts colleges, showing that this stronger focus on independence was not only true of elite institutions. Moreover, a longitudinal study of first‐generation students found that this focus on independence did not match the students’ interdependent motives for going to college, in that first‐generation students selected fewer independent motives (e.g., become an independent thinker) and twice as many interdependent motives (e.g., give back to the community), compared to their continuing‐generation counterparts, and that this greater focus on interdependent motives was associated with lower grades in the first 2 years of study, even after controlling for race and SAT scores.

As Stephens and her colleagues have shown elsewhere (e.g., Stephens, Brannon, Markus, & Nelson, 2015 ), there are steps that can be taken to reduce working‐class students’ perception that they do not fit with their university environment. These authors argue that ‘a key goal of interventions should be to fortify and to elaborate school‐relevant selves – the understanding that getting a college degree is central to “who I am”, “who I hope to become”, and “the future I envision for myself”’ (p. 3). Among the interventions that they advocate as ways of creating a more inclusive culture at university are: providing working‐class role models; diversifying the way in which university experience is represented, so that university culture also provides ways of achieving interdependent goals that may be more compatible with working‐class students’ values; and ensuring that working‐class students have a voice, for example, by providing forums in which they can express shared interests and concerns.

Although there is a less well‐developed line of work on the ways in which high‐status places of work affect the aspirations and behaviours of working‐class employees, there is good reason to assume that the effects and processes identified in research on universities as places to study generalize to prestigious employment organizations as places to work (Côté, 2011 ). To the extent that many workplaces are dominated by middle‐class values and practices, working‐class employees are likely to feel out of place (Ridgway & Fisk, 2012 ). This applies both to gaining entry to the workplace, by negotiating the application and selection process (Rivera, 2012 ), and (if successful) to the daily interactions between employees in the workplace. In the view of Stephens, Fryberg, and Markus ( 2012 ), many workplaces are characterized by cultures of expressive independence, where working‐class employees are less likely to feel at home. As Stephens et al . ( 2014 , p. 626) argue, ‘This mismatch between working‐class employees and their middle‐class colleagues and institutions could also reduce employees’ job security and satisfaction, continuing the cycle of disadvantage for working‐class employees.’

Towards an integrative model

The work reviewed here provides the basis for an integrative model of how social class affects thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. The model is shown in Figure  4 and builds on the work of others, especially that of Nicole Stephens and colleagues and that of Michael Kraus and colleagues. At the base of the model are differences in the material circumstances of working‐class and middle‐class people. These differences in income and wealth are associated with differences in social capital, in the form of friendship networks, and cultural capital, in the form of tacit knowledge about how systems work, that have a profound effect on the ways in which individuals who grow up in these different contexts construe themselves and their social environments. For example, if you have family members or friends who have university degrees and/or professional qualifications, you are more likely to entertain these as possible futures than if you do not have these networks; and if through these networks you have been exposed to libraries, museums, interviews, and so on, you are more likely to know how these cultural institutions work, less likely to be intimidated by them, and more likely to make use of them. In sum, a middle‐class upbringing is more likely to promote the perception that the environment is one full of challenges that can be met rather than threats that need to be avoided. These differences in self‐construal and models of interpersonal relations translate into differences in social emotions and behaviours that are noticeable to self and others, creating the opportunity for people to rank themselves and others, and for differences in norms and values to emerge. To the extent that high‐status institutions in society, such as elite universities and prestigious employers, are characterized by norms and values that are different from those that are familiar to working‐class people, the latter will feel uncomfortable in such institutions and will perform below their true potential.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is BJSO-57-267-g004.jpg

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

Also depicted in Figure  4 is the way in which ideology moderates the relations between social class, on the one hand, and social cognition and social behaviour, on the other, and the ways in which economic inequality and threat moderate the relations between psychological dispositions and social behaviour. Although there is good evidence for many of the proposed relations depicted in the model, there is relatively little hard evidence concerning the moderating roles of ideology and economic inequality and threat. There is evidence that economic threat is associated with prejudice (e.g., Billiet, Meuleman, & De Witte, 2014 ), and that this also applies to higher‐educated people (e.g., Kuppens et al ., 2018 ). There is also evidence that high economic inequality increases the tendency for high‐income people to be less generous to others (Côté et al ., 2015 ), but these are influences that need further examination. Likewise, there is evidence of the moderating impact of ideology on the translation from social class to social cognition and behaviour (e.g., Wiederkehr, Bonnot, Krauth‐Gruber, & Darnon, 2015 ), but this, too, is an influence that merits additional investigation. A further point worth making is that much of the work on which this integrative model is based was conducted in the United States, which raises the question of the extent to which it is applicable to other contexts. There are some differences between the United States and other Western, industrialized countries that are relevant to the model. For example, the United States is more economically unequal than virtually every other industrialized country (Piketty & Saez, 2014 ). At the same time, the perceived degree of social mobility is greater in the United States than in other countries (Isaacs, 2008 ) – although the reality is that social mobility is lower in the United States (and indeed in the United Kingdom; see Social Mobility Commission, 2017 ) than in many other industrialized counties (Isaacs, 2008 ). These differences in economic inequality and ideology mean that the moderating roles played by these factors may vary from one country to another. For example, there is evidence that those in Europe who are poor or on the left of the political spectrum are more concerned with and unhappy about inequality than are their American counterparts, which may be related to different beliefs about social mobility (Alesina, Di Tella, & MacCulloch, 2004 ). Although there seems to be no good reason to question the generalizability of the other relations posited in the model, there is an obvious need to expand the research base on which the model is founded.

Prospects for social change

The cycle of disadvantage that starts with poor material conditions and ends with lower chances of entering and succeeding in the very contexts (universities and high‐status workplaces) that could increase social mobility is not going to be changed in the absence of substantial pressure for social change. It is therefore interesting that when people are asked about social inequality, they generally say that they are in favour of greater equality.

Norton and Ariely ( 2011 ) asked a nationally representative sample of more than 5,500 Americans to estimate the (then) current wealth distribution in the United States and also to express their preferences for how wealth should be distributed. The key findings from this research were (1) that respondents greatly underestimated the degree of wealth inequality in the United States, believing that the wealthiest 20% of the population owned 59% of the wealth, where the actual figure is 84% and (2) that their preferred distribution of wealth among citizens was closer to equality than even their own incorrect estimations of the distribution (e.g., they expressed a preference that the top 20% should own 32% of the nation's wealth). This also held for wealthy respondents and Republican voters – albeit to a lesser extent than their poorer and Democrat counterparts. Similar results for Australian respondents were reported by Norton, Neal, Govan, Ariely, and Holland ( 2014 ).

These studies have been criticized on the grounds that the ‘quintile’ methodology they use provides respondents with an anchor (20%) from which they adjust upwards or downwards. However, when Eriksson and Simpson ( 2012 ) used a different methodology, they found that although American respondents’ preferences for wealth distribution were more unequal than those found using the quintile methodology, they were still much more egalitarian than the actual distribution. Similar conclusions were reached in a study of American adolescents conducted by Flanagan and Kornbluh ( 2017 ), where participants expressed a strong preference for a much more egalitarian society than the degree of stratification they perceived to exist in the United States. It is also worth noting that similar findings have been reported in a study of preferences for income inequality (Kiatpongsan & Norton, 2014 ), where it was found that American respondents underestimated the actual difference in income between CEOs and unskilled workers (354:1), and that their preferences regarding this difference (7:1) were more egalitarian than were their estimates (30:1).

Given the evidence that citizens consistently express a preference for less wealth and income inequality than what currently prevails in many societies, it is worth considering why there is not greater support for redistributive policies. It is known that one factor that weakens support for such policies is a belief in social mobility. American participants have been found to overestimate the degree of social mobility in the United States (Davidai & Gilovich, 2015 ; Kraus & Tan, 2015 ), and Shariff, Wiwad, and Aknin ( 2016 ) have shown, using a combination of survey and experimental methods, that higher perceived mobility leads to greater acceptance of income inequality. These authors also showed that the effect of their manipulation of perceived income mobility on tolerance for inequality was mediated by two factors: the expectation that respondents’ children would be upwardly mobile; and perceptions of the degree to which someone's economic standing was the result of effort, rather than luck. This suggests that people's attitudes to income inequality – and therefore their support for steps to reduce it – are shaped by their perceptions that (1) higher incomes are possible to achieve, at least for their children, and (2) when these higher incomes are achieved, they are deserved. It follows that any intervention that reduces the tendency to overestimate income mobility should increase support for redistributive policies.

Another factor that helps to account for lack of support for redistribution is people's perceptions of their own social standing or rank. Brown‐Iannuzzi, Lundberg, Kay, and Payne ( 2015 ) have shown that subjective status is correlated with support for redistributive policies, and that experimentally altering subjective status leads to changes in such support. In both cases, lower subjective status was associated with stronger support for redistribution, even when actual resources and self‐interest were held constant. So one's perception of one's own relative social rank influences support for redistribution. This points to the importance of social comparisons and suggests that those who compare themselves with others who have a lower social standing are less likely to be supportive of redistribution.

Evidence that people's attitudes to inequality and to policies that would reduce it can be influenced by quite straightforward interventions comes from research reported by McCall, Burk, Laperrière, and Richeson ( 2017 ). In three studies, these researchers show that exposing American participants to information about the rising economic inequality, compared to control information, led to stronger perceptions that economic success is due to structural factors rather than individual effort. In the largest of the three studies, involving a representative sample of American adults, it was also found that information about rising inequality led to greater endorsement of policies that could be implemented by government and by business to reduce inequality. This research shows that, under the right conditions, even those living in a society that is traditionally opposed to government intervention would support government policies to reduce inequality.

Also relevant to the likelihood of people taking social action on this issue is how descriptions of inequality are framed. Bruckmüller, Reese, and Martiny ( 2017 ) have shown that relatively subtle variations in such framing, such as whether an advantaged group is described as having more or a disadvantaged group is described as having less, influence perceptions of the legitimacy of these differences; larger differences between groups were evaluated as less legitimate when the disadvantaged group was described as having less. Perceptions of the illegitimacy of inequality in group outcomes are likely to evoke group‐based anger, which in turn is known to be one of the predictors of collective action (Van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004 ).

There is solid evidence that the material circumstances in which people develop and live their lives have a profound influence on the ways in which they construe themselves and their social environments. The resulting differences in the ways that working‐class and middle‐ and upper‐class people think and act serve to reinforce these influences of social class background, making it harder for working‐class individuals to benefit from the kinds of educational and employment opportunities that would increase social mobility and thereby improve their material circumstances. At a time when economic inequality is increasing in many countries, this lack of mobility puts a strain on social cohesion. Most people believe that economic inequality is undesirable and, when presented with the evidence of growing inequality, say that they would support government policies designed to reduce it. Given that the social class differences reviewed here have their origins in economic inequality, it follows that redistributive (or ‘predistributive’; Taylor‐Gooby, 2013 ) policies are urgently needed to create greater equality.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Colin Foad, Matt Easterbrook, Russell Spears and John Drury for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

  • Adler, N. E. , Epel, E. S. , Castellazzo, G. , & Ickovics, J. R. (2000). Relationship of subjective and objective social status with psychological and physiological functioning: Preliminary data in healthy, White women . Health Psychology , 19 , 586–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.19.6.586 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Adorno, T. W. , Frenkel‐Brunswik, E. , Levinson, D. J. , & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality . New York, NY: Harper & Row. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Alesina, A. , Di Tella, R. , & MacCulloch, R. (2004). Inequality and happiness: Are Europeans and Americans different? Journal of Public Economics , 88 , 2009–2042. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2003.07.006 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Altemeyer, R. A. (1998). The other “authoritarian personality” . Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 30 , 47–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60382-2 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Aries, E. , & Seider, M. (2007). The role of social class in the formation of identity: A study of public and elite private college students . Journal of Social Psychology , 147 , 137–157. https://doi.org/10.3200/socp.147.2.137-157 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Baron‐Cohen, S. , Wheelwright, S. , Hill, J. , Raste, Y. , & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the mind in the eyes” test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high‐functioning autism . Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines , 42 , 241–251. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-7610.00715 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Becker, J. C. , Kraus, M. W. , & Rheinschmidt‐Same, M. (2017). Cultural expressions of social class and their implications for group‐related beliefs and behaviors . Journal of Social Issues , 73 , 158–174. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12209 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Billiet, J. , Meuleman, B. , & De Witte, H. (2014). The relationship between ethnic threat and economic insecurity in times of economic crisis: Analysis of European Social Survey data . Migration Studies , 2 , 135–161. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnu023 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bourdieu, P. , & Passeron, J.‐C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (2nd ed.). London, UK: Sage. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Brandt, M. J. (2013). Do the disadvantaged legitimize the social system? A large‐scale test of the status‐legitimacy hypothesis . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 104 , 765–785. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031751 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Brandt, M. J. , & Henry, P. J. (2012). Psychological defensiveness as a mechanism explaining the relationship between low socioeconomic status and religiosity . International Journal for the Psychology of Religion , 22 , 321–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2011.646565 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Brandt, M. J. , & Van Tongeren, D. R. (2017). People both high and low on religious fundamentalism are prejudiced toward dissimilar groups . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 112 ( 1 ), 76–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000076 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Brown‐Iannuzzi, J. L. , Lundberg, K. B. , Kay, A. C. , & Payne, B. K. (2015). Subjective status shapes political preferences . Psychological Science , 26 , 15–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614553947 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Bruckmüller, S. , Reese, G. , & Martiny, S. E. (2017). Is higher inequality less legitimate? Depends on how you frame it! British Journal of Social Psychology , 56 , 766–781. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12202 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Buck, N. , & McFall, S. (2012). Understanding society: Design overview . Longitudinal and Life Course Studies , 3 , 5–17. https://doi.org/10.14301/llcs.v3i1.159 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Caricati, L. (2017). Testing the status‐legitimacy hypothesis: A multilevel modeling approach to the perception of legitimacy in income distribution in 36 nations . Journal of Social Psychology , 157 , 532–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2016.1242472 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Carvacho, H. , Zick, A. , Haye, A. , González, R. , Manzi, J. , Kocik, C. , & Bertl, M. (2013). On the relation between social class and prejudice: The roles of education, income, and ideological attitudes . European Journal of Social Psychology , 43 , 272–285. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1961 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Chowdry, H. , Crawford, C. , Dearden, L. , Goodman, A. , & Vignoles, A. (2013). Widening participation in higher education: Analysis using linked administrative data . Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A , 176 , 431–457. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-985x.2012.01043.x [ Google Scholar ]
  • Clery, E. , Lee, L. , & Kunz, S. (2013). Public attitudes to poverty and welfare, 1983–2011: Analysis using British attitudes data . London, UK: NatCen Social Research. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Cohen, S. , Alper, C. M. , Doyle, W. J. , Adler, N. , Treanor, J. J. , & Turner, R. B. (2008). Objective and subjective socioeconomic status and susceptibility to the common cold . Health Psychology , 27 , 268–274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.27.2.268 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Côté, S. (2011). How social class shapes thoughts and actions in organizations . Research in Organizational Behavior , 31 , 43–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2011.09.004 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Côté, S. , House, J. , & Willer, R. (2015). High economic inequality leads higher‐income individuals to be less generous . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 112 , 15838–15843. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1511536112 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Darnon, C. , Wiederkehr, V. , Dompnier, B. , & Martinot, D. (2018). ‘Where there is a will, there is a way’: Belief in school meritocracy and the social‐class achievement gap . British Journal of Social Psychology , 57 , 250–262. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12214 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Davidai, S. , & Gilovich, T. (2015). Building a more mobile America – One income quintile at a time . Perspectives on Psychological Science , 10 , 60–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614562005 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Department for Communities and Local Government . (2012). Citizenship survey . Retrieved from http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120919133219/http://www.communities.gov.uk/communities/research/citizenshipsurvey/
  • Dubois, D. , Rucker, D. D. , & Galinsky, A. D. (2015). Social class, power, and selfishness: When and why upper and lower class individuals behave unethically . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 108 , 436–449. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000008 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Easterbrook, M. , Kuppens, T. , & Manstead, A. S. R. (2018). Socioeconomic status and the structure of the self‐concept . Unpublished manuscript, University of Sussex. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Equality Trust . (2017). How has inequality changed? Retrieved from https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed
  • Eriksson, K. , & Simpson, B. (2012). What do Americans know about inequality? It depends on how you ask them . Judgment and Decision Making , 7 , 741–745. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Evans, G. , & Mellon, J. (2016). Social class: Identity, awareness and political attitudes: Why are we still working class? British Social Attitudes , 33 , 1–19. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Flanagan, C. A. , & Kornbluh, M. (2017). How unequal is the United States? Adolescents’ images of social stratification . Child Development . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12954 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Goldthorpe, J. H. , & Lockwood, D. (1963). Affluence and the British class structure . Sociological Review , 11 , 133–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1963.tb01230.x [ Google Scholar ]
  • Higher Education Statistics Agency . Retrieved from https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/overviews?keyword=All&year=13
  • Hutchings, M. , & Archer, L. (2001). ‘Higher than Einstein’: Constructions of going to university among working‐class non‐participants . Research Papers in Education , 16 , 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520010011879 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Isaacs, J. B. (2008). International comparisons of social mobility . Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Jerrim, J. (2013). Family background and access to high ‘status’ universities . London, UK: The Sutton Trust. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Jetten, J. , Iyer, A. , Tsivrikos, D. , & Young, B. M. (2008). When is individual mobility costly? The role of economic and social identity factors . European Journal of Social Psychology , 38 , 866–879. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.471 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Jetten, J. , Mols, F. , Healy, N. , & Spears, R. (2017). “Fear of falling”: Economic instability enhances collective angst among societies’ wealthy class . Journal of Social Issues , 73 , 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12204 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Jost, J. T. , Pelham, B. W. , Sheldon, O. , & Sullivan, B. N. (2003). Social inequality and the reduction of ideological dissonance on behalf of the system: Evidence of enhanced system justification among the disadvantaged . European Journal of Social Psychology , 33 , 13–36. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.127 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kiatpongsan, S. , & Norton, M. I. (2014). How much (more) should CEOs make? A universal desire for more equal pay . Perspectives on Psychological Science , 9 , 587–593. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614549773 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Korndörfer, M. , Egloff, B. , & Schmukle, S. C. (2015). A large scale test of the effect of social class on prosocial behavior . PLoS One , 10 ( 7 ), e0133193 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133193 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , & Callaghan, N. (2016). Social class and prosocial behavior: The moderating role of public versus private contexts . Social Psychological and Personality Science , 7 , 769–777. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616659120 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , Côté, S. , & Keltner, D. (2010). Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy . Psychological Science , 21 , 1716–1723. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610387613 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , & Keltner, D. (2009). Signs of socioeconomic status: A thin‐slicing approach . Psychological Science , 20 , 99–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02251.x [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , Park, J. W. , & Tan, J. J. X. (2017). Signs of social class: The experience of economic inequality in everyday life . Perspectives on Psychological Science , 12 , 422–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616673192 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , Piff, P. K. , & Keltner, D. (2009). Social class, the sense of control, and social explanation . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 97 , 992–1004. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016357 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , Piff, P. K. , & Keltner, D. (2011). Social class as culture: The convergence of resources and rank in the social realm . Current Directions in Psychological Science , 20 , 246–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411414654 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , Piff, P. K. , Mendoza‐Denton, R. , Rheinschmidt, M. L. , & Keltner, D. (2012). Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor . Psychological Review , 119 , 546–572. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028756 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kraus, M. W. , & Tan, J. J. (2015). Americans overestimate social class mobility . Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 58 , 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.01.005 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Kuppens, T. , Spears, R. , Manstead, A. S. R. , & Tausch, N. (2018). Education and lower prejudice towards immigrants and ethnic minorities: A question of increased enlightenment or reduced economic threat? Unpublished manuscript, University of Groningen. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Lehmann, W. (2009). Becoming middle class: How working‐class university students draw and transgress moral class boundaries . Sociology , 43 , 631–647. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038509105412 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Lehmann, W. (2013). Habitus transformation and hidden injuries: Successful working‐class university students . Sociology of Education , 87 ( 1 ), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040713498777 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Lipset, S. M. (1959). Democracy and working‐class authoritarianism . American Sociological Review , 24 , 482–501. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089536 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Mayer, J. D. , Salovey, P. , & Caruso, D. R. (2002). Mayer‐Salovey‐Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) user's manual . Toronto, ON: Multi‐Health Systems. [ Google Scholar ]
  • McCall, L. , Burk, D. , Laperrière, M. , & Richeson, J. A. (2017). Exposure to rising inequality shapes Americans’ opportunity beliefs and policy support . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 114 , 9593–9598. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706253114 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Nieuwenhuis, M. , Easterbrook, M. , & Manstead, A. S. R. (2018). Accounting for unequal access to higher education: The role of social identity factors . Unpublished manuscript, University of Sussex. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Norton, M. I. , & Ariely, D. (2011). Building a better America – One wealth quintile at a time . Perspectives on Psychological Science , 6 , 9–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610393524 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Norton, M. I. , Neal, D. T. , Govan, C. L. , Ariely, D. , & Holland, E. (2014). The not‐so‐common wealth of Australia: Evidence for a cross‐cultural desire for a more equal distribution of wealth . Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy , 14 , 339–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12058 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Office for National Statistics . (2014). Wealth in Great Britain Wave 4: 2012 to 2014 . Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/compendium/wealthingreatbritainwave4/2012to2014
  • Owuamalam, C. K. , Rubin, M. , & Spears, R. (2016). The system justification conundrum: Re‐examining the cognitive dissonance basis for system justification . Frontiers in Psychology , 7 , 1889 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01889 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Piff, P. K. , Kraus, M. W. , Côté, S. , Cheng, B. , & Keltner, D. (2010). Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 99 , 771–784. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020092 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Piff, P. K. , Stancato, D. , Côté, S. , Mendoza‐Denton, R. , & Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 109 , 4086–4091. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118373109 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Piketty, T. , & Saez, E. (2014). Inequality in the long run . Science , 344 , 838–843. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1251936 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Reay, D. , Crozier, G. , & Clayton, J. (2009). ‘Strangers in paradise’? Working‐class students in elite universities Sociology , 43 , 1103–1121. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038509345700 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Reay, D. , Crozier, G. , & Clayton, J. (2010). ‘Fitting in’ or ‘standing out’: Working‐class students in UK higher education . British Educational Research Journal , 36 ( 1 ), 107–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920902878925 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Ridgway, C. L. , & Fisk, S. R. (2012). Class rules, status dynamics, and “gateway” interactions In Fiske S. T. & Markus H. R. (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp. 131–151). New York, NY: Russell Sage. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Rivera, L. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms . American Sociological Review , 77 , 999–1022. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412463213 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Savage, M. , Devine, F. , Cunningham, N. , Taylor, M. , Li, Y. , Hjellbrekke, J. , … Miles, A. (2013). A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC's Great British class experiment . Sociology , 47 , 219–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038513481128 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Shariff, A. F. , Wiwad, D. , & Aknin, L. B. (2016). Income mobility breeds tolerance for income inequality: Cross‐national and experimental evidence . Psychological Science , 11 , 373–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616635596 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Sidanius, J. , & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchies and oppression . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139175043 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Social Mobility Commission . (2017). State of the nation 2017: Social mobility in Great Britain . London, UK: HM Stationery Office; Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/662744/State_of_the_Nation_2017_-_Social_Mobility_in_Great_Britain.pdf [ Google Scholar ]
  • Stephens, N. M. , Brannon, T. N. , Markus, H. R. , & Nelson, J. E. (2015). Feeling at home in college: Fortifying school‐relevant selves to reduce social class disparities in higher education . Social Issues and Policy Review , 9 ( 1 ), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12008 [ Google Scholar ]
  • Stephens, N. M. , Fryberg, S. A. , & Markus, H. R. (2012). It's your choice: How the middle‐class model of independence disadvantages working class Americans In Fiske S. T. & Markus H. R. (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp. 87–106). New York, NY: Russell Sage. [ Google Scholar ]
  • Stephens, N. M. , Fryberg, S. A. , Markus, H. R. , Johnson, C. , & Covarrubias, R. (2012). Unseen disadvantage: How American universities’ focus on independence undermines the academic performance of first‐generation college students . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 102 , 1178–1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027143 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Stephens, N. M. , Markus, H. M. , & Phillips, L. T. (2014). Social class culture cycles: How three gateway contexts shape selves and fuel inequality . Annual Review of Psychology , 65 , 611–634. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115143 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Taylor‐Gooby, P. (2013). Why do people stigmatise the poor at a time of rapidly increasing inequality, and what can be done about it? The Political Quarterly , 84 ( 1 ), 31–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-923x.2013.02435.x [ Google Scholar ]
  • Valentine, G. (2014). Inequality and class prejudice in an age of austerity . Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute; Retrieved from http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Brief8-inequality-and-class-prejudice-in-an-age-of-austerity.pdf . [ Google Scholar ]
  • Van Lange, P. A. , De Bruin, E. , Otten, W. , & Joireman, J. A. (1997). Development of prosocial, individualistic, and competitive orientations: Theory and preliminary evidence . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 73 , 733 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.73.4.733 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Van Zomeren, M. , Spears, R. , Fischer, A. H. , & Leach, C. W. (2004). Put your money where your mouth is! Explaining collective action tendencies through group‐based anger and group efficacy . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 87 , 649–664. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.5.649 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
  • Wiederkehr, V. , Bonnot, V. , Krauth‐Gruber, S. , & Darnon, C. (2015). Belief in school meritocracy as a system‐justifying tool for low status students . Frontiers in Psychology , 6 , 1053 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01053 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

8 ways Gen Z will change the workforce

Soon there will be more Zoomers working full time than Baby Boomers. Roberta Katz explains how their values and expectations will shape the future of work.

social position research paper

Image credit: Claire Scully

Gen Z is growing up: In 2024, the generation born between 1996 to 2010 is expected to overtake Baby Boomers in the full-time workforce, according to a recent analysis by Glassdoor .

They are bringing to the office a different set of values, behaviors, and expectations than prior generations, according to research by Roberta Katz , a former senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) . Katz collaborated with a team of researchers to conduct a large, multi-year study to find out what matters to Gen Z and why – findings that culminated in a book and website .

Stanford Report sat down with Katz to talk about this research and what to expect from Gen Z in the workplace.

1. Gen Z expects change

The world Gen Zers came of age in was fundamentally different from that of their parents and even millennials, people who were born in the early 1980s to 1996.

The world of Gen Z has been defined by technological changes happening at rapid speeds that also reshaped social experiences. Disruption and impermanence have always been part of the world Gen Z experienced – for them, it’s a norm, not an exception.

“There is an expectation of constant change,” said Katz.

Growing up amid uncertainty has given Gen Z a unique set of characteristics, including being flexible and resilient. It has opened them up to new ways of thinking about the future and doing things – and questioning the ways things are done, which leads to the next trait Gen Zers will bring with them to work.

2. Gen Z is pragmatic

Gen Z has a strong sense of self-agency.

Gen Z lives in a world that has always been one search engine result away. If they want to know more about something, they readily seek the answer out for themselves ( even if it’s not always the correct one ).

They question everything and everyone – from their peers, parents, or people at work. “They don’t necessarily see elders as experts,” Katz said. “They want to understand why something is done in a certain way. They’re very pragmatic.”

They are also not afraid to challenge why things are done the way they are.

“When an older person says to them, ‘This is how you should do it,’ they want to check that out for themselves. It doesn’t mean they’re always right; it’s a different way of understanding,” Katz explained.

3. Gen Z wants to make a difference

Gen Zers not only expect change – they demand it.

They are inheriting a set of complex problems – from climate change to inequality to racial injustice, to name but a few – and want to fix it. They want to work for a place that they believe is doing good in the world.

Some Gen Zers will hold their employers accountable on the causes and issues that matter to them.

Katz warns that for some employers, it can be challenging – if not untenable – to take a position on politically charged or sensitive topics. “It is impossible for most institutions that represent lots of people and lots of identities to satisfy everybody,” Katz said.

4. Gen Z values collaboration and teamwork

For some Gen Zers, the digital world helped shape their identity: Through social media and in online groups, they found subcultures to connect and interact with.

They grew up with wikis – websites collaboratively built and edited by its users – and fandoms – enthusiastic and energetic communities centered around a shared, common interest. For example, K-pop sensation BTS has its Army , Beyonce has her Beyhive, and Taylor Swift has her Swifties.

“They’re in a posse – even with their headphones on,” Katz said.

To get things done, they value collaboration.

“There is a hope that everybody who is contributing is in it for the good of the whole,” Katz describes. “They want to have a team spirit.”

5. Gen Z wants leaders who guide by consensus

Gen Z is also less hierarchical than previous generations.

“They don’t believe in hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake,” Katz said. “They do believe in hierarchy where it is useful.”

Instead, Gen Zers prefer leadership that is dependent on expertise that is task or time specific. That could mean they favor management where team members take turns leading the group (known as a “rotating leadership” model). Another style they may prefer is “collaborative leadership,” in which people from across the organization participate in decision-making and problem-solving.

Transparency is also important.

Gen Zers value consensus and they look for leaders who are in service of the group (also called “service leadership”).

6. Gen Z cares about mental health and work-life balance

Gen Z grew up in a period that saw the blurring of the 9-to-5 work schedule and the rise of flexible work models – a mode of working that led to older generations feeling a pressure to always be “on.”

“Work and home life are all so integrated that if you don’t pay attention, you could be working all the time,” said Katz. “I think Gen Z is sensitive to that.”

Having a work-life balance and maintaining mental and physical health is also important to Gen Z.

“They’re placing a value on the human experience and recognizing that life is more than work,” Katz said.

7. Gen Z thinks differently about loyalty

Because Gen Z grew up amid so much change, Gen Z has a different perspective on loyalty.

But as Katz pointed out, “they also grew up with workplaces not being very loyal to their employees.”

Gen Zers were raised in the shadows of the global financial crisis of 2008, an event that has had long-lasting impacts on employment and the nature of work. “It used to be that people went to work for big companies thinking they’d be there for their entire career and that the company would watch out for them: providing health insurance, and so on,” Katz said.

But after the 2008 recession, and even more recently following the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have cut back labor costs and implemented other cost-saving measures, like reducing perks and benefits. Meanwhile, mass layoffs have also been rampant.

“There’s a reason that employees don’t feel the same degree of loyalty, too,” Katz said.

Meanwhile, the gig economy has also been present throughout Gen Zers’ lives, as has the rise of contract work. They are entrepreneurial, which is part of their pragmatic tendencies.

8. Gen Z looks for trust and authenticity

Gen Z also values authenticity.

“Authenticity is about trust,” Katz said. “Words and actions need to match.”

Honesty and openness are important.

For Katz, it’s all about mutually respectful communication. “My bottom line always to employers is stay open to hearing about different ways to get things done, because Gen Z has one foot in the future.”

Katz is associate vice president for strategic planning, emerita, and is currently involved in a strategic role with the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence . She also serves as vice chair of the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS).

Katz studied Gen Z as part of a multi-year CASBS research project with Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist at the University of Oxford and formerly at Stanford; Jane Shaw, a historian who is the principal of Harris Manchester College at Oxford and was previously dean for religious life at Stanford; and Linda Woodhead, a sociologist at King’s College London. The research was funded by the Knight Foundation.

From 2004 to 2017, Katz served under Stanford University Presidents John Hennessy and Marc Tessier-Lavigne as associate vice president for strategic planning, and in 2017 as interim chief of staff.

  • Systematic review
  • Open access
  • Published: 19 February 2024

‘It depends’: what 86 systematic reviews tell us about what strategies to use to support the use of research in clinical practice

  • Annette Boaz   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0557-1294 1 ,
  • Juan Baeza 2 ,
  • Alec Fraser   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1121-1551 2 &
  • Erik Persson 3  

Implementation Science volume  19 , Article number:  15 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

1758 Accesses

68 Altmetric

Metrics details

The gap between research findings and clinical practice is well documented and a range of strategies have been developed to support the implementation of research into clinical practice. The objective of this study was to update and extend two previous reviews of systematic reviews of strategies designed to implement research evidence into clinical practice.

We developed a comprehensive systematic literature search strategy based on the terms used in the previous reviews to identify studies that looked explicitly at interventions designed to turn research evidence into practice. The search was performed in June 2022 in four electronic databases: Medline, Embase, Cochrane and Epistemonikos. We searched from January 2010 up to June 2022 and applied no language restrictions. Two independent reviewers appraised the quality of included studies using a quality assessment checklist. To reduce the risk of bias, papers were excluded following discussion between all members of the team. Data were synthesised using descriptive and narrative techniques to identify themes and patterns linked to intervention strategies, targeted behaviours, study settings and study outcomes.

We identified 32 reviews conducted between 2010 and 2022. The reviews are mainly of multi-faceted interventions ( n  = 20) although there are reviews focusing on single strategies (ICT, educational, reminders, local opinion leaders, audit and feedback, social media and toolkits). The majority of reviews report strategies achieving small impacts (normally on processes of care). There is much less evidence that these strategies have shifted patient outcomes. Furthermore, a lot of nuance lies behind these headline findings, and this is increasingly commented upon in the reviews themselves.

Combined with the two previous reviews, 86 systematic reviews of strategies to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice have been identified. We need to shift the emphasis away from isolating individual and multi-faceted interventions to better understanding and building more situated, relational and organisational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice. This will involve drawing on a wider range of research perspectives (including social science) in primary studies and diversifying the types of synthesis undertaken to include approaches such as realist synthesis which facilitate exploration of the context in which strategies are employed.

Peer Review reports

Contribution to the literature

Considerable time and money is invested in implementing and evaluating strategies to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice.

The growing body of evidence is not providing the anticipated clear lessons to support improved implementation.

Instead what is needed is better understanding and building more situated, relational and organisational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice.

This would involve a more central role in implementation science for a wider range of perspectives, especially from the social, economic, political and behavioural sciences and for greater use of different types of synthesis, such as realist synthesis.

Introduction

The gap between research findings and clinical practice is well documented and a range of interventions has been developed to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice [ 1 , 2 ]. In recent years researchers have worked to improve the consistency in the ways in which these interventions (often called strategies) are described to support their evaluation. One notable development has been the emergence of Implementation Science as a field focusing explicitly on “the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice” ([ 3 ] p. 1). The work of implementation science focuses on closing, or at least narrowing, the gap between research and practice. One contribution has been to map existing interventions, identifying 73 discreet strategies to support research implementation [ 4 ] which have been grouped into 9 clusters [ 5 ]. The authors note that they have not considered the evidence of effectiveness of the individual strategies and that a next step is to understand better which strategies perform best in which combinations and for what purposes [ 4 ]. Other authors have noted that there is also scope to learn more from other related fields of study such as policy implementation [ 6 ] and to draw on methods designed to support the evaluation of complex interventions [ 7 ].

The increase in activity designed to support the implementation of research into practice and improvements in reporting provided the impetus for an update of a review of systematic reviews of the effectiveness of interventions designed to support the use of research in clinical practice [ 8 ] which was itself an update of the review conducted by Grimshaw and colleagues in 2001. The 2001 review [ 9 ] identified 41 reviews considering a range of strategies including educational interventions, audit and feedback, computerised decision support to financial incentives and combined interventions. The authors concluded that all the interventions had the potential to promote the uptake of evidence in practice, although no one intervention seemed to be more effective than the others in all settings. They concluded that combined interventions were more likely to be effective than single interventions. The 2011 review identified a further 13 systematic reviews containing 313 discrete primary studies. Consistent with the previous review, four main strategy types were identified: audit and feedback; computerised decision support; opinion leaders; and multi-faceted interventions (MFIs). Nine of the reviews reported on MFIs. The review highlighted the small effects of single interventions such as audit and feedback, computerised decision support and opinion leaders. MFIs claimed an improvement in effectiveness over single interventions, although effect sizes remained small to moderate and this improvement in effectiveness relating to MFIs has been questioned in a subsequent review [ 10 ]. In updating the review, we anticipated a larger pool of reviews and an opportunity to consolidate learning from more recent systematic reviews of interventions.

This review updates and extends our previous review of systematic reviews of interventions designed to implement research evidence into clinical practice. To identify potentially relevant peer-reviewed research papers, we developed a comprehensive systematic literature search strategy based on the terms used in the Grimshaw et al. [ 9 ] and Boaz, Baeza and Fraser [ 8 ] overview articles. To ensure optimal retrieval, our search strategy was refined with support from an expert university librarian, considering the ongoing improvements in the development of search filters for systematic reviews since our first review [ 11 ]. We also wanted to include technology-related terms (e.g. apps, algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence) to find studies that explored interventions based on the use of technological innovations as mechanistic tools for increasing the use of evidence into practice (see Additional file 1 : Appendix A for full search strategy).

The search was performed in June 2022 in the following electronic databases: Medline, Embase, Cochrane and Epistemonikos. We searched for articles published since the 2011 review. We searched from January 2010 up to June 2022 and applied no language restrictions. Reference lists of relevant papers were also examined.

We uploaded the results using EPPI-Reviewer, a web-based tool that facilitated semi-automation of the screening process and removal of duplicate studies. We made particular use of a priority screening function to reduce screening workload and avoid ‘data deluge’ [ 12 ]. Through machine learning, one reviewer screened a smaller number of records ( n  = 1200) to train the software to predict whether a given record was more likely to be relevant or irrelevant, thus pulling the relevant studies towards the beginning of the screening process. This automation did not replace manual work but helped the reviewer to identify eligible studies more quickly. During the selection process, we included studies that looked explicitly at interventions designed to turn research evidence into practice. Studies were included if they met the following pre-determined inclusion criteria:

The study was a systematic review

Search terms were included

Focused on the implementation of research evidence into practice

The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed as part of the review

Study populations included healthcare providers and patients. The EPOC taxonomy [ 13 ] was used to categorise the strategies. The EPOC taxonomy has four domains: delivery arrangements, financial arrangements, governance arrangements and implementation strategies. The implementation strategies domain includes 20 strategies targeted at healthcare workers. Numerous EPOC strategies were assessed in the review including educational strategies, local opinion leaders, reminders, ICT-focused approaches and audit and feedback. Some strategies that did not fit easily within the EPOC categories were also included. These were social media strategies and toolkits, and multi-faceted interventions (MFIs) (see Table  2 ). Some systematic reviews included comparisons of different interventions while other reviews compared one type of intervention against a control group. Outcomes related to improvements in health care processes or patient well-being. Numerous individual study types (RCT, CCT, BA, ITS) were included within the systematic reviews.

We excluded papers that:

Focused on changing patient rather than provider behaviour

Had no demonstrable outcomes

Made unclear or no reference to research evidence

The last of these criteria was sometimes difficult to judge, and there was considerable discussion amongst the research team as to whether the link between research evidence and practice was sufficiently explicit in the interventions analysed. As we discussed in the previous review [ 8 ] in the field of healthcare, the principle of evidence-based practice is widely acknowledged and tools to change behaviour such as guidelines are often seen to be an implicit codification of evidence, despite the fact that this is not always the case.

Reviewers employed a two-stage process to select papers for inclusion. First, all titles and abstracts were screened by one reviewer to determine whether the study met the inclusion criteria. Two papers [ 14 , 15 ] were identified that fell just before the 2010 cut-off. As they were not identified in the searches for the first review [ 8 ] they were included and progressed to assessment. Each paper was rated as include, exclude or maybe. The full texts of 111 relevant papers were assessed independently by at least two authors. To reduce the risk of bias, papers were excluded following discussion between all members of the team. 32 papers met the inclusion criteria and proceeded to data extraction. The study selection procedure is documented in a PRISMA literature flow diagram (see Fig.  1 ). We were able to include French, Spanish and Portuguese papers in the selection reflecting the language skills in the study team, but none of the papers identified met the inclusion criteria. Other non- English language papers were excluded.

figure 1

PRISMA flow diagram. Source: authors

One reviewer extracted data on strategy type, number of included studies, local, target population, effectiveness and scope of impact from the included studies. Two reviewers then independently read each paper and noted key findings and broad themes of interest which were then discussed amongst the wider authorial team. Two independent reviewers appraised the quality of included studies using a Quality Assessment Checklist based on Oxman and Guyatt [ 16 ] and Francke et al. [ 17 ]. Each study was rated a quality score ranging from 1 (extensive flaws) to 7 (minimal flaws) (see Additional file 2 : Appendix B). All disagreements were resolved through discussion. Studies were not excluded in this updated overview based on methodological quality as we aimed to reflect the full extent of current research into this topic.

The extracted data were synthesised using descriptive and narrative techniques to identify themes and patterns in the data linked to intervention strategies, targeted behaviours, study settings and study outcomes.

Thirty-two studies were included in the systematic review. Table 1. provides a detailed overview of the included systematic reviews comprising reference, strategy type, quality score, number of included studies, local, target population, effectiveness and scope of impact (see Table  1. at the end of the manuscript). Overall, the quality of the studies was high. Twenty-three studies scored 7, six studies scored 6, one study scored 5, one study scored 4 and one study scored 3. The primary focus of the review was on reviews of effectiveness studies, but a small number of reviews did include data from a wider range of methods including qualitative studies which added to the analysis in the papers [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. The majority of reviews report strategies achieving small impacts (normally on processes of care). There is much less evidence that these strategies have shifted patient outcomes. In this section, we discuss the different EPOC-defined implementation strategies in turn. Interestingly, we found only two ‘new’ approaches in this review that did not fit into the existing EPOC approaches. These are a review focused on the use of social media and a review considering toolkits. In addition to single interventions, we also discuss multi-faceted interventions. These were the most common intervention approach overall. A summary is provided in Table  2 .

Educational strategies

The overview identified three systematic reviews focusing on educational strategies. Grudniewicz et al. [ 22 ] explored the effectiveness of printed educational materials on primary care physician knowledge, behaviour and patient outcomes and concluded they were not effective in any of these aspects. Koota, Kääriäinen and Melender [ 23 ] focused on educational interventions promoting evidence-based practice among emergency room/accident and emergency nurses and found that interventions involving face-to-face contact led to significant or highly significant effects on patient benefits and emergency nurses’ knowledge, skills and behaviour. Interventions using written self-directed learning materials also led to significant improvements in nurses’ knowledge of evidence-based practice. Although the quality of the studies was high, the review primarily included small studies with low response rates, and many of them relied on self-assessed outcomes; consequently, the strength of the evidence for these outcomes is modest. Wu et al. [ 20 ] questioned if educational interventions aimed at nurses to support the implementation of evidence-based practice improve patient outcomes. Although based on evaluation projects and qualitative data, their results also suggest that positive changes on patient outcomes can be made following the implementation of specific evidence-based approaches (or projects). The differing positive outcomes for educational strategies aimed at nurses might indicate that the target audience is important.

Local opinion leaders

Flodgren et al. [ 24 ] was the only systemic review focusing solely on opinion leaders. The review found that local opinion leaders alone, or in combination with other interventions, can be effective in promoting evidence‐based practice, but this varies both within and between studies and the effect on patient outcomes is uncertain. The review found that, overall, any intervention involving opinion leaders probably improves healthcare professionals’ compliance with evidence-based practice but varies within and across studies. However, how opinion leaders had an impact could not be determined because of insufficient details were provided, illustrating that reporting specific details in published studies is important if diffusion of effective methods of increasing evidence-based practice is to be spread across a system. The usefulness of this review is questionable because it cannot provide evidence of what is an effective opinion leader, whether teams of opinion leaders or a single opinion leader are most effective, or the most effective methods used by opinion leaders.

Pantoja et al. [ 26 ] was the only systemic review focusing solely on manually generated reminders delivered on paper included in the overview. The review explored how these affected professional practice and patient outcomes. The review concluded that manually generated reminders delivered on paper as a single intervention probably led to small to moderate increases in adherence to clinical recommendations, and they could be used as a single quality improvement intervention. However, the authors indicated that this intervention would make little or no difference to patient outcomes. The authors state that such a low-tech intervention may be useful in low- and middle-income countries where paper records are more likely to be the norm.

ICT-focused approaches

The three ICT-focused reviews [ 14 , 27 , 28 ] showed mixed results. Jamal, McKenzie and Clark [ 14 ] explored the impact of health information technology on the quality of medical and health care. They examined the impact of electronic health record, computerised provider order-entry, or decision support system. This showed a positive improvement in adherence to evidence-based guidelines but not to patient outcomes. The number of studies included in the review was low and so a conclusive recommendation could not be reached based on this review. Similarly, Brown et al. [ 28 ] found that technology-enabled knowledge translation interventions may improve knowledge of health professionals, but all eight studies raised concerns of bias. The De Angelis et al. [ 27 ] review was more promising, reporting that ICT can be a good way of disseminating clinical practice guidelines but conclude that it is unclear which type of ICT method is the most effective.

Audit and feedback

Sykes, McAnuff and Kolehmainen [ 29 ] examined whether audit and feedback were effective in dementia care and concluded that it remains unclear which ingredients of audit and feedback are successful as the reviewed papers illustrated large variations in the effectiveness of interventions using audit and feedback.

Non-EPOC listed strategies: social media, toolkits

There were two new (non-EPOC listed) intervention types identified in this review compared to the 2011 review — fewer than anticipated. We categorised a third — ‘care bundles’ [ 36 ] as a multi-faceted intervention due to its description in practice and a fourth — ‘Technology Enhanced Knowledge Transfer’ [ 28 ] was classified as an ICT-focused approach. The first new strategy was identified in Bhatt et al.’s [ 30 ] systematic review of the use of social media for the dissemination of clinical practice guidelines. They reported that the use of social media resulted in a significant improvement in knowledge and compliance with evidence-based guidelines compared with more traditional methods. They noted that a wide selection of different healthcare professionals and patients engaged with this type of social media and its global reach may be significant for low- and middle-income countries. This review was also noteworthy for developing a simple stepwise method for using social media for the dissemination of clinical practice guidelines. However, it is debatable whether social media can be classified as an intervention or just a different way of delivering an intervention. For example, the review discussed involving opinion leaders and patient advocates through social media. However, this was a small review that included only five studies, so further research in this new area is needed. Yamada et al. [ 31 ] draw on 39 studies to explore the application of toolkits, 18 of which had toolkits embedded within larger KT interventions, and 21 of which evaluated toolkits as standalone interventions. The individual component strategies of the toolkits were highly variable though the authors suggest that they align most closely with educational strategies. The authors conclude that toolkits as either standalone strategies or as part of MFIs hold some promise for facilitating evidence use in practice but caution that the quality of many of the primary studies included is considered weak limiting these findings.

Multi-faceted interventions

The majority of the systematic reviews ( n  = 20) reported on more than one intervention type. Some of these systematic reviews focus exclusively on multi-faceted interventions, whilst others compare different single or combined interventions aimed at achieving similar outcomes in particular settings. While these two approaches are often described in a similar way, they are actually quite distinct from each other as the former report how multiple strategies may be strategically combined in pursuance of an agreed goal, whilst the latter report how different strategies may be incidentally used in sometimes contrasting settings in the pursuance of similar goals. Ariyo et al. [ 35 ] helpfully summarise five key elements often found in effective MFI strategies in LMICs — but which may also be transferrable to HICs. First, effective MFIs encourage a multi-disciplinary approach acknowledging the roles played by different professional groups to collectively incorporate evidence-informed practice. Second, they utilise leadership drawing on a wide set of clinical and non-clinical actors including managers and even government officials. Third, multiple types of educational practices are utilised — including input from patients as stakeholders in some cases. Fourth, protocols, checklists and bundles are used — most effectively when local ownership is encouraged. Finally, most MFIs included an emphasis on monitoring and evaluation [ 35 ]. In contrast, other studies offer little information about the nature of the different MFI components of included studies which makes it difficult to extrapolate much learning from them in relation to why or how MFIs might affect practice (e.g. [ 28 , 38 ]). Ultimately, context matters, which some review authors argue makes it difficult to say with real certainty whether single or MFI strategies are superior (e.g. [ 21 , 27 ]). Taking all the systematic reviews together we may conclude that MFIs appear to be more likely to generate positive results than single interventions (e.g. [ 34 , 45 ]) though other reviews should make us cautious (e.g. [ 32 , 43 ]).

While multi-faceted interventions still seem to be more effective than single-strategy interventions, there were important distinctions between how the results of reviews of MFIs are interpreted in this review as compared to the previous reviews [ 8 , 9 ], reflecting greater nuance and debate in the literature. This was particularly noticeable where the effectiveness of MFIs was compared to single strategies, reflecting developments widely discussed in previous studies [ 10 ]. We found that most systematic reviews are bounded by their clinical, professional, spatial, system, or setting criteria and often seek to draw out implications for the implementation of evidence in their areas of specific interest (such as nursing or acute care). Frequently this means combining all relevant studies to explore the respective foci of each systematic review. Therefore, most reviews we categorised as MFIs actually include highly variable numbers and combinations of intervention strategies and highly heterogeneous original study designs. This makes statistical analyses of the type used by Squires et al. [ 10 ] on the three reviews in their paper not possible. Further, it also makes extrapolating findings and commenting on broad themes complex and difficult. This may suggest that future research should shift its focus from merely examining ‘what works’ to ‘what works where and what works for whom’ — perhaps pointing to the value of realist approaches to these complex review topics [ 48 , 49 ] and other more theory-informed approaches [ 50 ].

Some reviews have a relatively small number of studies (i.e. fewer than 10) and the authors are often understandably reluctant to engage with wider debates about the implications of their findings. Other larger studies do engage in deeper discussions about internal comparisons of findings across included studies and also contextualise these in wider debates. Some of the most informative studies (e.g. [ 35 , 40 ]) move beyond EPOC categories and contextualise MFIs within wider systems thinking and implementation theory. This distinction between MFIs and single interventions can actually be very useful as it offers lessons about the contexts in which individual interventions might have bounded effectiveness (i.e. educational interventions for individual change). Taken as a whole, this may also then help in terms of how and when to conjoin single interventions into effective MFIs.

In the two previous reviews, a consistent finding was that MFIs were more effective than single interventions [ 8 , 9 ]. However, like Squires et al. [ 10 ] this overview is more equivocal on this important issue. There are four points which may help account for the differences in findings in this regard. Firstly, the diversity of the systematic reviews in terms of clinical topic or setting is an important factor. Secondly, there is heterogeneity of the studies within the included systematic reviews themselves. Thirdly, there is a lack of consistency with regards to the definition and strategies included within of MFIs. Finally, there are epistemological differences across the papers and the reviews. This means that the results that are presented depend on the methods used to measure, report, and synthesise them. For instance, some reviews highlight that education strategies can be useful to improve provider understanding — but without wider organisational or system-level change, they may struggle to deliver sustained transformation [ 19 , 44 ].

It is also worth highlighting the importance of the theory of change underlying the different interventions. Where authors of the systematic reviews draw on theory, there is space to discuss/explain findings. We note a distinction between theoretical and atheoretical systematic review discussion sections. Atheoretical reviews tend to present acontextual findings (for instance, one study found very positive results for one intervention, and this gets highlighted in the abstract) whilst theoretically informed reviews attempt to contextualise and explain patterns within the included studies. Theory-informed systematic reviews seem more likely to offer more profound and useful insights (see [ 19 , 35 , 40 , 43 , 45 ]). We find that the most insightful systematic reviews of MFIs engage in theoretical generalisation — they attempt to go beyond the data of individual studies and discuss the wider implications of the findings of the studies within their reviews drawing on implementation theory. At the same time, they highlight the active role of context and the wider relational and system-wide issues linked to implementation. It is these types of investigations that can help providers further develop evidence-based practice.

This overview has identified a small, but insightful set of papers that interrogate and help theorise why, how, for whom, and in which circumstances it might be the case that MFIs are superior (see [ 19 , 35 , 40 ] once more). At the level of this overview — and in most of the systematic reviews included — it appears to be the case that MFIs struggle with the question of attribution. In addition, there are other important elements that are often unmeasured, or unreported (e.g. costs of the intervention — see [ 40 ]). Finally, the stronger systematic reviews [ 19 , 35 , 40 , 43 , 45 ] engage with systems issues, human agency and context [ 18 ] in a way that was not evident in the systematic reviews identified in the previous reviews [ 8 , 9 ]. The earlier reviews lacked any theory of change that might explain why MFIs might be more effective than single ones — whereas now some systematic reviews do this, which enables them to conclude that sometimes single interventions can still be more effective.

As Nilsen et al. ([ 6 ] p. 7) note ‘Study findings concerning the effectiveness of various approaches are continuously synthesized and assembled in systematic reviews’. We may have gone as far as we can in understanding the implementation of evidence through systematic reviews of single and multi-faceted interventions and the next step would be to conduct more research exploring the complex and situated nature of evidence used in clinical practice and by particular professional groups. This would further build on the nuanced discussion and conclusion sections in a subset of the papers we reviewed. This might also support the field to move away from isolating individual implementation strategies [ 6 ] to explore the complex processes involving a range of actors with differing capacities [ 51 ] working in diverse organisational cultures. Taxonomies of implementation strategies do not fully account for the complex process of implementation, which involves a range of different actors with different capacities and skills across multiple system levels. There is plenty of work to build on, particularly in the social sciences, which currently sits at the margins of debates about evidence implementation (see for example, Normalisation Process Theory [ 52 ]).

There are several changes that we have identified in this overview of systematic reviews in comparison to the review we published in 2011 [ 8 ]. A consistent and welcome finding is that the overall quality of the systematic reviews themselves appears to have improved between the two reviews, although this is not reflected upon in the papers. This is exhibited through better, clearer reporting mechanisms in relation to the mechanics of the reviews, alongside a greater attention to, and deeper description of, how potential biases in included papers are discussed. Additionally, there is an increased, but still limited, inclusion of original studies conducted in low- and middle-income countries as opposed to just high-income countries. Importantly, we found that many of these systematic reviews are attuned to, and comment upon the contextual distinctions of pursuing evidence-informed interventions in health care settings in different economic settings. Furthermore, systematic reviews included in this updated article cover a wider set of clinical specialities (both within and beyond hospital settings) and have a focus on a wider set of healthcare professions — discussing both similarities, differences and inter-professional challenges faced therein, compared to the earlier reviews. These wider ranges of studies highlight that a particular intervention or group of interventions may work well for one professional group but be ineffective for another. This diversity of study settings allows us to consider the important role context (in its many forms) plays on implementing evidence into practice. Examining the complex and varied context of health care will help us address what Nilsen et al. ([ 6 ] p. 1) described as, ‘society’s health problems [that] require research-based knowledge acted on by healthcare practitioners together with implementation of political measures from governmental agencies’. This will help us shift implementation science to move, ‘beyond a success or failure perspective towards improved analysis of variables that could explain the impact of the implementation process’ ([ 6 ] p. 2).

This review brings together 32 papers considering individual and multi-faceted interventions designed to support the use of evidence in clinical practice. The majority of reviews report strategies achieving small impacts (normally on processes of care). There is much less evidence that these strategies have shifted patient outcomes. Combined with the two previous reviews, 86 systematic reviews of strategies to increase the implementation of research into clinical practice have been conducted. As a whole, this substantial body of knowledge struggles to tell us more about the use of individual and MFIs than: ‘it depends’. To really move forwards in addressing the gap between research evidence and practice, we may need to shift the emphasis away from isolating individual and multi-faceted interventions to better understanding and building more situated, relational and organisational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice. This will involve drawing on a wider range of perspectives, especially from the social, economic, political and behavioural sciences in primary studies and diversifying the types of synthesis undertaken to include approaches such as realist synthesis which facilitate exploration of the context in which strategies are employed. Harvey et al. [ 53 ] suggest that when context is likely to be critical to implementation success there are a range of primary research approaches (participatory research, realist evaluation, developmental evaluation, ethnography, quality/ rapid cycle improvement) that are likely to be appropriate and insightful. While these approaches often form part of implementation studies in the form of process evaluations, they are usually relatively small scale in relation to implementation research as a whole. As a result, the findings often do not make it into the subsequent systematic reviews. This review provides further evidence that we need to bring qualitative approaches in from the periphery to play a central role in many implementation studies and subsequent evidence syntheses. It would be helpful for systematic reviews, at the very least, to include more detail about the interventions and their implementation in terms of how and why they worked.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Before and after study

Controlled clinical trial

Effective Practice and Organisation of Care

High-income countries

Information and Communications Technology

Interrupted time series

Knowledge translation

Low- and middle-income countries

Randomised controlled trial

Grol R, Grimshaw J. From best evidence to best practice: effective implementation of change in patients’ care. Lancet. 2003;362:1225–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(03)14546-1 .

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Green LA, Seifert CM. Translation of research into practice: why we can’t “just do it.” J Am Board Fam Pract. 2005;18:541–5. https://doi.org/10.3122/jabfm.18.6.541 .

Eccles MP, Mittman BS. Welcome to Implementation Science. Implement Sci. 2006;1:1–3. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-1-1 .

Article   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Powell BJ, Waltz TJ, Chinman MJ, Damschroder LJ, Smith JL, Matthieu MM, et al. A refined compilation of implementation strategies: results from the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) project. Implement Sci. 2015;10:2–14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0209-1 .

Article   Google Scholar  

Waltz TJ, Powell BJ, Matthieu MM, Damschroder LJ, et al. Use of concept mapping to characterize relationships among implementation strategies and assess their feasibility and importance: results from the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) study. Implement Sci. 2015;10:1–8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0295-0 .

Nilsen P, Ståhl C, Roback K, et al. Never the twain shall meet? - a comparison of implementation science and policy implementation research. Implementation Sci. 2013;8:2–12. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-8-63 .

Rycroft-Malone J, Seers K, Eldh AC, et al. A realist process evaluation within the Facilitating Implementation of Research Evidence (FIRE) cluster randomised controlled international trial: an exemplar. Implementation Sci. 2018;13:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-018-0811-0 .

Boaz A, Baeza J, Fraser A, European Implementation Score Collaborative Group (EIS). Effective implementation of research into practice: an overview of systematic reviews of the health literature. BMC Res Notes. 2011;4:212. https://doi.org/10.1186/1756-0500-4-212 .

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Grimshaw JM, Shirran L, Thomas R, Mowatt G, Fraser C, Bero L, et al. Changing provider behavior – an overview of systematic reviews of interventions. Med Care. 2001;39 8Suppl 2:II2–45.

Google Scholar  

Squires JE, Sullivan K, Eccles MP, et al. Are multifaceted interventions more effective than single-component interventions in changing health-care professionals’ behaviours? An overview of systematic reviews. Implement Sci. 2014;9:1–22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-014-0152-6 .

Salvador-Oliván JA, Marco-Cuenca G, Arquero-Avilés R. Development of an efficient search filter to retrieve systematic reviews from PubMed. J Med Libr Assoc. 2021;109:561–74. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2021.1223 .

Thomas JM. Diffusion of innovation in systematic review methodology: why is study selection not yet assisted by automation? OA Evid Based Med. 2013;1:1–6.

Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC). The EPOC taxonomy of health systems interventions. EPOC Resources for review authors. Oslo: Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services; 2016. epoc.cochrane.org/epoc-taxonomy . Accessed 9 Oct 2023.

Jamal A, McKenzie K, Clark M. The impact of health information technology on the quality of medical and health care: a systematic review. Health Inf Manag. 2009;38:26–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/183335830903800305 .

Menon A, Korner-Bitensky N, Kastner M, et al. Strategies for rehabilitation professionals to move evidence-based knowledge into practice: a systematic review. J Rehabil Med. 2009;41:1024–32. https://doi.org/10.2340/16501977-0451 .

Oxman AD, Guyatt GH. Validation of an index of the quality of review articles. J Clin Epidemiol. 1991;44:1271–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/0895-4356(91)90160-b .

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Francke AL, Smit MC, de Veer AJ, et al. Factors influencing the implementation of clinical guidelines for health care professionals: a systematic meta-review. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2008;8:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-8-38 .

Jones CA, Roop SC, Pohar SL, et al. Translating knowledge in rehabilitation: systematic review. Phys Ther. 2015;95:663–77. https://doi.org/10.2522/ptj.20130512 .

Scott D, Albrecht L, O’Leary K, Ball GDC, et al. Systematic review of knowledge translation strategies in the allied health professions. Implement Sci. 2012;7:1–17. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-7-70 .

Wu Y, Brettle A, Zhou C, Ou J, et al. Do educational interventions aimed at nurses to support the implementation of evidence-based practice improve patient outcomes? A systematic review. Nurse Educ Today. 2018;70:109–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2018.08.026 .

Yost J, Ganann R, Thompson D, Aloweni F, et al. The effectiveness of knowledge translation interventions for promoting evidence-informed decision-making among nurses in tertiary care: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Implement Sci. 2015;10:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0286-1 .

Grudniewicz A, Kealy R, Rodseth RN, Hamid J, et al. What is the effectiveness of printed educational materials on primary care physician knowledge, behaviour, and patient outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analyses. Implement Sci. 2015;10:2–12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0347-5 .

Koota E, Kääriäinen M, Melender HL. Educational interventions promoting evidence-based practice among emergency nurses: a systematic review. Int Emerg Nurs. 2018;41:51–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ienj.2018.06.004 .

Flodgren G, O’Brien MA, Parmelli E, et al. Local opinion leaders: effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD000125.pub5 .

Arditi C, Rège-Walther M, Durieux P, et al. Computer-generated reminders delivered on paper to healthcare professionals: effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD001175.pub4 .

Pantoja T, Grimshaw JM, Colomer N, et al. Manually-generated reminders delivered on paper: effects on professional practice and patient outcomes. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD001174.pub4 .

De Angelis G, Davies B, King J, McEwan J, et al. Information and communication technologies for the dissemination of clinical practice guidelines to health professionals: a systematic review. JMIR Med Educ. 2016;2:e16. https://doi.org/10.2196/mededu.6288 .

Brown A, Barnes C, Byaruhanga J, McLaughlin M, et al. Effectiveness of technology-enabled knowledge translation strategies in improving the use of research in public health: systematic review. J Med Internet Res. 2020;22:e17274. https://doi.org/10.2196/17274 .

Sykes MJ, McAnuff J, Kolehmainen N. When is audit and feedback effective in dementia care? A systematic review. Int J Nurs Stud. 2018;79:27–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2017.10.013 .

Bhatt NR, Czarniecki SW, Borgmann H, et al. A systematic review of the use of social media for dissemination of clinical practice guidelines. Eur Urol Focus. 2021;7:1195–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euf.2020.10.008 .

Yamada J, Shorkey A, Barwick M, Widger K, et al. The effectiveness of toolkits as knowledge translation strategies for integrating evidence into clinical care: a systematic review. BMJ Open. 2015;5:e006808. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006808 .

Afari-Asiedu S, Abdulai MA, Tostmann A, et al. Interventions to improve dispensing of antibiotics at the community level in low and middle income countries: a systematic review. J Glob Antimicrob Resist. 2022;29:259–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jgar.2022.03.009 .

Boonacker CW, Hoes AW, Dikhoff MJ, Schilder AG, et al. Interventions in health care professionals to improve treatment in children with upper respiratory tract infections. Int J Pediatr Otorhinolaryngol. 2010;74:1113–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2010.07.008 .

Al Zoubi FM, Menon A, Mayo NE, et al. The effectiveness of interventions designed to increase the uptake of clinical practice guidelines and best practices among musculoskeletal professionals: a systematic review. BMC Health Serv Res. 2018;18:2–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-018-3253-0 .

Ariyo P, Zayed B, Riese V, Anton B, et al. Implementation strategies to reduce surgical site infections: a systematic review. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2019;3:287–300. https://doi.org/10.1017/ice.2018.355 .

Borgert MJ, Goossens A, Dongelmans DA. What are effective strategies for the implementation of care bundles on ICUs: a systematic review. Implement Sci. 2015;10:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0306-1 .

Cahill LS, Carey LM, Lannin NA, et al. Implementation interventions to promote the uptake of evidence-based practices in stroke rehabilitation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012575.pub2 .

Pedersen ER, Rubenstein L, Kandrack R, Danz M, et al. Elusive search for effective provider interventions: a systematic review of provider interventions to increase adherence to evidence-based treatment for depression. Implement Sci. 2018;13:1–30. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-018-0788-8 .

Jenkins HJ, Hancock MJ, French SD, Maher CG, et al. Effectiveness of interventions designed to reduce the use of imaging for low-back pain: a systematic review. CMAJ. 2015;187:401–8. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.141183 .

Bennett S, Laver K, MacAndrew M, Beattie E, et al. Implementation of evidence-based, non-pharmacological interventions addressing behavior and psychological symptoms of dementia: a systematic review focused on implementation strategies. Int Psychogeriatr. 2021;33:947–75. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610220001702 .

Noonan VK, Wolfe DL, Thorogood NP, et al. Knowledge translation and implementation in spinal cord injury: a systematic review. Spinal Cord. 2014;52:578–87. https://doi.org/10.1038/sc.2014.62 .

Albrecht L, Archibald M, Snelgrove-Clarke E, et al. Systematic review of knowledge translation strategies to promote research uptake in child health settings. J Pediatr Nurs. 2016;31:235–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2015.12.002 .

Campbell A, Louie-Poon S, Slater L, et al. Knowledge translation strategies used by healthcare professionals in child health settings: an updated systematic review. J Pediatr Nurs. 2019;47:114–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2019.04.026 .

Bird ML, Miller T, Connell LA, et al. Moving stroke rehabilitation evidence into practice: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Clin Rehabil. 2019;33:1586–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269215519847253 .

Goorts K, Dizon J, Milanese S. The effectiveness of implementation strategies for promoting evidence informed interventions in allied healthcare: a systematic review. BMC Health Serv Res. 2021;21:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06190-0 .

Zadro JR, O’Keeffe M, Allison JL, Lembke KA, et al. Effectiveness of implementation strategies to improve adherence of physical therapist treatment choices to clinical practice guidelines for musculoskeletal conditions: systematic review. Phys Ther. 2020;100:1516–41. https://doi.org/10.1093/ptj/pzaa101 .

Van der Veer SN, Jager KJ, Nache AM, et al. Translating knowledge on best practice into improving quality of RRT care: a systematic review of implementation strategies. Kidney Int. 2011;80:1021–34. https://doi.org/10.1038/ki.2011.222 .

Pawson R, Greenhalgh T, Harvey G, et al. Realist review–a new method of systematic review designed for complex policy interventions. J Health Serv Res Policy. 2005;10Suppl 1:21–34. https://doi.org/10.1258/1355819054308530 .

Rycroft-Malone J, McCormack B, Hutchinson AM, et al. Realist synthesis: illustrating the method for implementation research. Implementation Sci. 2012;7:1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-7-33 .

Johnson MJ, May CR. Promoting professional behaviour change in healthcare: what interventions work, and why? A theory-led overview of systematic reviews. BMJ Open. 2015;5:e008592. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-008592 .

Metz A, Jensen T, Farley A, Boaz A, et al. Is implementation research out of step with implementation practice? Pathways to effective implementation support over the last decade. Implement Res Pract. 2022;3:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/26334895221105585 .

May CR, Finch TL, Cornford J, Exley C, et al. Integrating telecare for chronic disease management in the community: What needs to be done? BMC Health Serv Res. 2011;11:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11-131 .

Harvey G, Rycroft-Malone J, Seers K, Wilson P, et al. Connecting the science and practice of implementation – applying the lens of context to inform study design in implementation research. Front Health Serv. 2023;3:1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2023.1162762 .

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Kathryn Oliver for her support in the planning the review, Professor Steve Hanney for reading and commenting on the final manuscript and the staff at LSHTM library for their support in planning and conducting the literature search.

This study was supported by LSHTM’s Research England QR strategic priorities funding allocation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration South London (NIHR ARC South London) at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Grant number NIHR200152. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR, the Department of Health and Social Care or Research England.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, The Policy Institute, King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6LE, UK

Annette Boaz

King’s Business School, King’s College London, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG, UK

Juan Baeza & Alec Fraser

Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Campus Universitário Reitor João Davi Ferreira Lima, Florianópolis, SC, 88.040-900, Brazil

Erik Persson

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

AB led the conceptual development and structure of the manuscript. EP conducted the searches and data extraction. All authors contributed to screening and quality appraisal. EP and AF wrote the first draft of the methods section. AB, JB and AF performed result synthesis and contributed to the analyses. AB wrote the first draft of the manuscript and incorporated feedback and revisions from all other authors. All authors revised and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Annette Boaz .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Additional file 1: appendix a., additional file 2: appendix b., rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Boaz, A., Baeza, J., Fraser, A. et al. ‘It depends’: what 86 systematic reviews tell us about what strategies to use to support the use of research in clinical practice. Implementation Sci 19 , 15 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-024-01337-z

Download citation

Received : 01 November 2023

Accepted : 05 January 2024

Published : 19 February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-024-01337-z

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

  • Implementation
  • Interventions
  • Clinical practice
  • Research evidence
  • Multi-faceted

Implementation Science

ISSN: 1748-5908

  • Submission enquiries: Access here and click Contact Us
  • General enquiries: [email protected]

social position research paper

social position research paper

RECOMMENDED READS

  • I-JEPA: The first AI model based on Yann LeCun’s vision for more human-like AI
  • Celebrating 10 years of FAIR: A decade of advancing the state-of-the-art through open research
  • Turing Award presented to Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio
  • Today, we’re publicly releasing the Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) model, a crucial step in advancing machine intelligence with a more grounded understanding of the world.
  • This early example of a physical world model excels at detecting and understanding highly detailed interactions between objects.
  • In the spirit of responsible open science, we’re releasing this model under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license for researchers to further explore.

As humans, much of what we learn about the world around us—particularly in our early stages of life—is gleaned through observation. Take Newton’s third law of motion: Even an infant (or a cat) can intuit, after knocking several items off a table and observing the results, that what goes up must come down. You don’t need hours of instruction or to read thousands of books to arrive at that result. Your internal world model—a contextual understanding based on a mental model of the world—predicts these consequences for you, and it’s highly efficient.

“V-JEPA is a step toward a more grounded understanding of the world so machines can achieve more generalized reasoning and planning,” says Meta’s VP & Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who proposed the original Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) in 2022. “Our goal is to build advanced machine intelligence that can learn more like humans do, forming internal models of the world around them to learn, adapt, and forge plans efficiently in the service of completing complex tasks.”

Video JEPA in focus

V-JEPA is a non-generative model that learns by predicting missing or masked parts of a video in an abstract representation space. This is similar to how our Image Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA) compares abstract representations of images (rather than comparing the pixels themselves). Unlike generative approaches that try to fill in every missing pixel, V-JEPA has the flexibility to discard unpredictable information, which leads to improved training and sample efficiency by a factor between 1.5x and 6x.

Because it takes a self-supervised learning approach, V-JEPA is pre-trained entirely with unlabeled data. Labels are only used to adapt the model to a particular task after pre-training. This type of architecture proves more efficient than previous models, both in terms of the number of labeled examples needed and the total amount of effort put into learning even the unlabeled data. With V-JEPA, we’ve seen efficiency boosts on both of these fronts.

With V-JEPA, we mask out a large portion of a video so the model is only shown a little bit of the context. We then ask the predictor to fill in the blanks of what’s missing—not in terms of the actual pixels, but rather as a more abstract description in this representation space.

social position research paper

Masking methodology

V-JEPA wasn’t trained to understand one specific type of action. Instead it used self-supervised training on a range of videos and learned a number of things about how the world works. The team also carefully considered the masking strategy—if you don’t block out large regions of the video and instead randomly sample patches here and there, it makes the task too easy and your model doesn’t learn anything particularly complicated about the world.

It’s also important to note that, in most videos, things evolve somewhat slowly over time. If you mask a portion of the video but only for a specific instant in time and the model can see what came immediately before and/or immediately after, it also makes things too easy and the model almost certainly won’t learn anything interesting. As such, the team used an approach where it masked portions of the video in both space and time, which forces the model to learn and develop an understanding of the scene.

Efficient predictions

Making these predictions in the abstract representation space is important because it allows the model to focus on the higher-level conceptual information of what the video contains without worrying about the kind of details that are most often unimportant for downstream tasks. After all, if a video shows a tree, you’re likely not concerned about the minute movements of each individual leaf.

One of the reasons why we’re excited about this direction is that V-JEPA is the first model for video that’s good at “frozen evaluations,” which means we do all of our self-supervised pre-training on the encoder and the predictor, and then we don’t touch those parts of the model anymore. When we want to adapt them to learn a new skill, we just train a small lightweight specialized layer or a small network on top of that, which is very efficient and quick.

social position research paper

Previous work had to do full fine-tuning, which means that after pre-training your model, when you want the model to get really good at fine-grained action recognition while you’re adapting your model to take on that task, you have to update the parameters or the weights in all of your model. And then that model overall becomes specialized at doing that one task and it’s not going to be good for anything else anymore. If you want to teach the model a different task, you have to use different data, and you have to specialize the entire model for this other task. With V-JEPA, as we’ve demonstrated in this work, we can pre-train the model once without any labeled data, fix that, and then reuse those same parts of the model for several different tasks, like action classification, recognition of fine-grained object interactions, and activity localization.

social position research paper

Avenues for future research...

While the “V” in V-JEPA stands for “video,” it only accounts for the visual content of videos thus far. A more multimodal approach is an obvious next step, so we’re thinking carefully about incorporating audio along with the visuals.

As a proof of concept, the current V-JEPA model excels at fine-grained object interactions and distinguishing detailed object-to-object interactions that happen over time. For example, if the model needs to be able to distinguish between someone putting down a pen, picking up a pen, and pretending to put down a pen but not actually doing it, V-JEPA is quite good compared to previous methods for that high-grade action recognition task. However, those things work on relatively short time scales. If you show V-JEPA a video clip of a few seconds, maybe up to 10 seconds, it’s great for that. So another important step for us is thinking about planning and the model’s ability to make predictions over a longer time horizon.

...and the path toward AMI

To date, our work with V-JEPA has been primarily about perception—understanding the contents of various video streams in order to obtain some context about the world immediately surrounding us. The predictor in this Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture serves as an early physical world model: You don’t have to see everything that’s happening in the frame, and it can tell you conceptually what’s happening there. As a next step, we want to show how we can use this kind of a predictor or world model for planning or sequential decision-making.

We know that it’s possible to train JEPA models on video data without requiring strong supervision and that they can watch videos in the way an infant might—just observing the world passively, learning a lot of interesting things about how to understand the context of those videos in such a way that, with a small amount of labeled data, you can quickly acquire a new task and ability to recognize different actions.

V-JEPA is a research model, and we’re exploring a number of future applications. For example, we expect that the context V-JEPA provides could be useful for our embodied AI work as well as our work to build a contextual AI assistant for future AR glasses. We firmly believe in the value of responsible open science, and that’s why we’re releasing the V-JEPA model under the CC BY-NC license so other researchers can extend this work.

Our latest updates delivered to your inbox

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with Meta AI news, events, research breakthroughs, and more.

Join us in the pursuit of what’s possible with AI.

social position research paper

Latest Work

Our Actions

Meta © 2024

Read our research on: Immigration & Migration | Podcasts | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

Acknowledgments.

This report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of the following individuals.

Kim Parker, Director of Social Trends Research Juliana Horowitz, Associate Director, Research Luona Lin, Research Associate Rachel Minkin, Research Associate Isabel Goddard, Research Associate       Kiley Hurst, Research Analyst              Dana Braga, Research Assistant Shannon Greenwood, Digital Production Manager            John Carlo Mandapat, Information Graphics Designer      Anna Jackson, Editorial Assistant                                               Julia O’Hanlon, Communications Manager Mithila Samak, Communications Associate

In addition, the project benefited greatly from the guidance of the Pew Research Center methodology team: Courtney Kennedy, Andrew Mercer, Ashley Amaya, Dorene Asare-Marfo, Dana Popky, Anna Brown and Arnold Lau.

Social Trends Monthly Newsletter

Sign up to to receive a monthly digest of the Center's latest research on the attitudes and behaviors of Americans in key realms of daily life

Report Materials

Table of contents, ‘back to school’ means anytime from late july to after labor day, depending on where in the u.s. you live, among many u.s. children, reading for fun has become less common, federal data shows, most european students learn english in school, for u.s. teens today, summer means more schooling and less leisure time than in the past, about one-in-six u.s. teachers work second jobs – and not just in the summer, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Advertisement

Advertisement

Perceived Social Position and Objective Inequality: Do They Move Together? Evidence from Europe and the United States

  • Research Paper
  • Published: 11 July 2016
  • Volume 2 , pages 281–303, ( 2016 )

Cite this article

  • Chiara Assunta Ricci 1  

5930 Accesses

4 Citations

2 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

According to the literature on social class analysis, both subjective and objective dimensions should be considered, since the perception of social position can influence economic behaviour and choices. The aim of this paper is to investigate objective and perceived social position inequality in six different countries from the 1990s to the 2000s in order to find out whether these dimensions move together or are independent from each other. The results suggest that people perceive themselves as more similar/dissimilar to other members of society than what income-based and other objective aspects show. In particular, considering the whole sample, evidence of an increasing income distance between social groups is found, while we observe no increase in inequality in perceptions when controlling individual characteristics. Consequently, the dynamics of perceptions can help explain, for example, the empirical evidence regarding the lack of reaction to the rise of economic disparities and the general emulative consumption behaviours associated with increasing inequality detected in some countries.

Similar content being viewed by others

social position research paper

Individuals’ socioeconomic position, inequality perceptions, and redistributive preferences in OECD countries

Gwangeun Choi

Is Income Inequality Related to Tolerance for Inequality?

Martin Schröder

Ungleichheit: Wahrnehmung und Wirklichkeit – ein internationaler Vergleich

Judith Niehues

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

According to the sociological literature, the analysis of social classes should take into account multiple dimensions and factors, such as income, wealth, relations of production, lifestyle, education and occupation. Furthermore, many different authors (Hodge and Treiman 1968 ; Jackman and Jackman 1973 ; Wright and Singelmann 1982 ; Savage 2015 ) emphasise the role of individuals’ perceptions of their position in society in their analysis of social classes. These sociologists argue that no study of social class can be comprehensive enough if it does not take into account a person’s sense of self, which may not coincide completely with objective reality and may influence individuals’ behaviour and choices.

By contrast, the economic literature often ignores many of these factors and opts for analyses based on statistically measurable characteristics, such as income and consumption. Despite the wide acceptance of the conceptualisations of class offered by the sociological theory, in their empirical works economists tend to consider only relative definitions and use the term “class” to refer to specific strata of the income distribution. This practice raises issues concerning the lack of both sound theoretical assumptions and stable criteria to define and operationalise the theoretical concept of “class” and in particular the “middle class”. For example, comparing the results from different empirical studies can be difficult when the definition of the classes depends on the whole sample considered.

Despite these methodological issues, evidence from many studies lets us evaluate the role of specific elements representing the “real” socio-economic aspects of individuals’ life, while the role of perception is often neglected. In particular, these studies demonstrate that the evolution of living standards of different groups across society can depend on real income growth over time, wealth and debts to finance consumption (Atkinson and Brandolini 2013 ), insecurity and vulnerability in income due to greater risks of unemployment and volatility in earnings (Torche and López-Calva 2013 ; Krugman 2014 ; Ricci 2016 ).

The channels through which these aspects may have effects on individuals’ choices are difficult to disentangle, and the purpose of this paper is not to go into this issue. In fact, the starting point of this study is the consideration that social class can be understood as both a subjective and an objective (at least in economic terms) phenomenon. Furthermore, this paper aims to analyze how these two dimensions evolve. In particular, we are interested in analysing whether changes in the degree of inequality within specific groups in terms of objective data are associated with similar changes in the perceptions of the members of the same groups by controlling variations in individual characteristics. The hypothesis is that people could perceive to be similar to (different from) other members of their group when objective socio-economic data show an increasing (decreasing) distance among them.

The empirical analysis refers to the changes that occurred in income distribution, socio-economic characteristics and subjective perception of social position within society in six different countries: Germany, Italy, Poland, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. First, we analyse how the income distribution has evolved during the period 1994–2010 on the basis of objective reality, by exploring income inequalities across the whole population and considering different population subgroups. To this aim we use the comparative distributional data sources available in the Luxembourg Income Study. Then self perceptions are introduced, by analysing the changes occurred in subjective perceptions of social position and their determinants. The analysis aims at finding out whether these changes are due to a variation in individual characteristics or other unobservable factors.

The reported values of people’s social self perception from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) are considered to investigate the main drivers of the inequality in 1992 and 2009. The purpose of this analysis is to evaluate the different impact of covariates on people’s social perception. The analysis also aims to find out to what extent the shape of the distribution of people into different classes depends on specific individual features. The interaction between people’s perception and objective data on their socio-economic characteristics will permit to make some considerations on the role of perception in people’s real behaviour and choices.

The paper is organised as follows. In the next section a review of the literature on perception of people’s position in society and its determinants is provided. In Sect.  3 , data and methodological choices are briefly presented. Then, empirical results are discussed (Sect.  4 ). Finally, Sect.  5 draws some conclusions on the relationship between subjective perceptions of personal position in society and measured objective inequality.

2 Self Perceived Social Position and Objective Reality: A Review of the Literature

The importance of the perceptions of individuals of their position in society has been emphasised by different studies, in particular in social classes’ analysis. According to sociologists Hodge and Treiman ( 1968 ), Jackman and Jackman ( 1973 ), Wright and Singelmann ( 1982 ), Savage ( 2015 ), a comprehensive analysis of social class has to include the person’s sense of self, as it may be different from objective reality but definitely affecting behaviour and choices. Similarly, Akerlof and Kranton ( 2000 ) considered how identity affects economic outcomes. They incorporated the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behaviour. Furthermore, other authors (North 1990 ; Rizzello 2000 ), following Hayek’s intuitions, took the view that knowledge is the fruit of an “endogenous construction” and that perception represents the source of the unpredictability of behaviour and the cornerstone of economic change.

The match between perception and reality can depend on many different elements across societies over time. Considering self perceived social position as the variable that indicates people’s own opinions of their location in society, many authors investigate the main drivers of the perceived position in society and the consequences on people’s values and attitudes.

From a theoretical point of view, Marx identified the relations of production as the most influential factor of the individuals’ perception of the exterior world. So, as pointed out by Evans and Kelley ( 2004 ), there is a clear connection between the objective conditions of production in a capitalist society and the workers’ consciousness of their position across the social scale (e.g. Marx 1844 ; Marx and Engels 1968 , p. 37). Similarly, objective circumstances are relevant into subjective perceptions in the Durkheim’s approach to the study of society ( 1933 , pp. 187–190, 256–263). However, Marx and Durkheim had different theories about the possible evolution of objective circumstances over time and, consequentially, of reflection on individuals’ self perception.

Some empirical analyses examined the relations between a number of factors, on both a micro and macro level, and people’s own opinions of their location in society. One of the first studies was conducted by Hodge and Treiman 1968 who investigated the impact of different socioeconomic characteristics on the subjective social position declared. Their results suggested that education, main earner’s occupation, and family income are very influential on class identification but they also demonstrated that patterns of acquaintance and kinship between various status groups influence the position declared. According to this evidence, the two authors criticised the interest theory of classes in sociology because this latter neglects the great range of between-class contacts and exaggerates the role of economic position in the formation of class consciousness. Vanneman and Pampel ( 1977 ) observed the relationship between occupation and class self-identification. Their study concluded that people perceive themselves as “working class” or “middle class” according to a manual-non manual working dichotomy rather than to a continuous prestige scale. This result contributed to reorient the sociological debate between continuous and discontinuous models of the stratification system in favor of the latter. More recently, Yamaguchi and Wang ( 2002 ) considered the interplay between class identification and family/gender, testing the relationship between married women’s class identifications and their objective class situations in the United States. What emerges is that class identification depends equally on the spouses’ income but only the husband’s occupational prestige affects subjective social class. Furthermore, men and women assign a different role to education when they assess the subjectively identified class.

The work of Evans and Kelley ( 2004 ) investigated subjective social status using data from surveys collected from representative national samples in 21 countries. The authors found that in all societies there is a pronounced tendency to see oneself as being in the middle, and this tendency holds in rich nations as well as in poor ones. The economic condition of individuals, the wealth of nations, and the national level of unemployment all have substantial effects on subjective status, but their effects are muted by the tendency to see oneself as being in the middle of the hierarchy with important implications for class identity and democracy.

Similarly, Paul Krugman in a recent article claimed that:

“One of the odd things about the United States has long been the immense range of people who consider themselves to be middle class - and are deluding themselves. Low-paid workers who would be considered poor by international standards, say with incomes below half the median, nonetheless consider themselves lower-middle-class; people with incomes four or five times the median consider themselves, at most, upper-middle-class” (Krugman 2014 ).

In order to explain this evidence, Kelley and Evans ( 1995 ) developed the “Reference group and Reality (R&R) – blend” hypothesis, according to which individuals develop perceptions and self-images looking at their reference group, fairly homogeneous with respect to themselves. This homogeneity means that most people are encouraged to declare middle categories, overestimating the number of people with the same features (Kelley 1967 ; Kahneman et al. 1982 ). Lindemann’s empirical study ( 2007 ) is focused on Estonian society to find out what kinds of assets and resources affect people’s opinion of their position in society. Coherently with some of the studies already mentioned, the analysis shows that, also in Estonia, income is the most important determinant in shaping people’s opinion of their social position. More interesting evidence is that in Estonia the significant impact of age on subjective social status is confirmed, but, contrary to what is observable in the Western countries (Yamaguchi and Wang 2002 ), being younger increases the probability of identifying with the higher positions.

Furthermore, Andersen and Curtis ( 2012 ) using cumulative logit mixed models fitted to World Values Survey data from 44 countries explored the impact of economic conditions, both on the individual-level and the national-level, on social class identification. Consistent with previous research, they found a positive relationship between household income and class identification in all countries explored, though this relationship varies substantially. They also found that income inequality has an important polarising effect on class identification and, specifically, the relationship between household income and class identity tends to be strongest in countries with a high level of income inequality.

Another significant analysis was conducted by Lora and Fajardo ( 2011 , ( 2015 ) who provided a set of comparisons between objective (based on statistically measurable characteristics such as income and consumption) and subjective definitions of middle-class using data from the 2007 World Gallup Poll. Seven objective income-based definitions of social class were contrasted with a self-perceived social status measure. One of the conclusions is that mismatches between the objective and the subjective classification of social class result from the fact that self-perceived social status is associated not just with income, but also with personal capabilities, interpersonal relations, financial and material assets, and perceptions of economic insecurity.

Overall, literature quantified the impact of different socioeconomic characteristics on the subjective social position declared and observed in different cases a significant mismatch between objective and subjective dimension. Moreover, authors stressed the relevance of subjective perceptions of position across society to influence economic outcomes and well-being. According to this framework, the aim of this paper is to extend the analysis from the level of people’s self-declared position in society to the inequality observed within this variable in order to assess whether changes in the degree of inequality within socioeconomic groups in terms of objective circumstances are associated with similar changes in the perceptions of the members of the same groups.

3 Data and Methodological Choices

The analysis of the evolution of incomes distribution in six different countries (Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States) is based on the comparable cross-country data provided by LIS via the Luxembourg Income Study ( 2015 ) (LIS). European countries are selected in order to give an assessment across a range of welfare and labour market regimes in Europe. In order to analyse income dynamics from the beginning of the 1990s to the 2000s, observations of the waves between 1994 and 2010 have been selected. Coherently with the definition that is standard in the LIS literature (Gornick and Jäntti 2013 ), we consider disposable household income which is the sum of all total monetary and non monetary (goods and services) payments received by the household or its individual members at annual or more frequent intervals, that are available for current consumption and that do not reduce the net worth of the household net of income taxes and social security contributions. Some non-monetary incomes that may be important are omitted because they are not available in the LIS microdata. These sources of incomes include imputed rents, non-cash public transfers (in essence, the value of public services), non-cash private income (such as the value of in- kind employer-provided benefits), and unrealized capital gains. As reported by LIS, they are excluded from disposable household income because these sources are rarely available in the income microdata and, when available, they are calculated with widely varying methodologies. For example, transfers are very hard to evaluate on the individual level and thus are typically only available on the macro-level. Thus, an analysis of these sources cannot be included in this study.

Not being able to know how income is divided between household members, family income rather than an individual measure is used. Considering that the same yearly income provides a higher standard of living for a single-person family than it does for individuals belonging to larger families, family income is adjusted by family size using the square root of household size. Disposable incomes have been inflated to within-country 2010 prices using national consumer price indices for all items (IXOB) from OECD and have been converted to international dollars using the PPPs for Actual Individual Consumption (A01) in 2010 from OECD. Furthermore, according to Atkinson and Brandolini ( 2013 ), to minimize the impact of outliers all records with zero income are dropped, the bottom cut-off is 1 % of the mean of equivalent disposable income while top cut-off is 10 times the median of unadjusted disposable income.

To investigate perception and its evolution on the basis of individuals’ characteristics, data is drawn from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), a continuing annual programme of cross-national collaboration on surveys covering topics important for social science research. The ISSP Social Inequality module deals with different attitudes towards income inequality, views on earnings and incomes, legitimation of inequality, career advancement by means of family background and networks, social cleavages and conflict among groups, and the current and past social position.

For the aims of this research observations are selected from the second and the fourth survey, referred to 1992 and 2009 respectively, from which a question on the subjective position on the social scale and socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents can be drawn. Unfortunately, if ISSP also includes questions for income, this variable was not considered in this research given the difficulty to obtain comparable data. Footnote 1 Selecting individuals of our six countries (for which the data is comparable across all variables) and excluding the individuals for which at least one variable of the analysis is missing, the observations in the sample are 7601 for the first period and 6603 for the second period. Internal weights, supplied by the ISSP to achieve distributions on key variables that are consistent with those found in the populations, are used in analysing the survey data.

The main variable of interest, Subjective Social Position, is the reported answer to the question:

In our society there are groups which tend to be towards the top and groups which tend to be towards the bottom. Below is a scale that runs from bottom to top. Where would you put yourself now on this scale?

In all countries, social strata were labeled consecutively from 1 to 10 with 1 at the bottom and 10 at the top, as a categorical ordered variable.

The approach to investigate incomes, individual characteristics and perceptions and their changes over time is composed of three steps. The first step observes individual income distributions in different periods considering the Gini indices across the whole population and different subgroups from 1994 to 2010. Then, the analysis of perception is carried out in two different steps to identify and quantify the contribution of a set of covariates in levels and over time change of perception inequality. First, we investigate how age, gender, education, status and profession increase or decrease the variance using the Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regressions for two time periods (1992 and 2009) and the Gini index of the variable “declared position on social scale” . Then, we identify and quantify the role of the covariates in shaping the evolution of subjective social position inequality over time, by means of the decomposition method proposed by Fortin et al. ( 2011 ) which is a generalisation of the Oaxaca–Blinder procedure and can be applied to any distributional parameter other than the mean. The procedures applied are described in the following sections.

3.1 Self Perceived Social Position Inequality: The Decomposition Approach

In this section it is shown how to formally break down changes in the distribution of the variable subjective social position into the contribution of each group of covariates using the recentered influence function (RIF) regression approach introduced by Firpo et al. ( 2009 ).

This method is adopted since the aim is to extend the traditional literature analysis from the level of people’s self-declared position in society to the inequality observed within this variable for two different years 1992 and 2009. The procedure is similar to the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition for the mean of a distribution (Oaxaca 1973 ; Blinder 1973 ) but, instead of recurring to a standard regression, the RIF-regressions allow us to perform the same kind of decomposition for any distributional parameter for which an influence function can be computed, including the variance and the Gini index.

Let \(Y_{i1} \) be the declared position of an individual i observed in period 1, and \(Y_{i0} \) the corresponding value in period 0. For each individual i the category declared across the social scale is given by \(Y_i =Y_{i1}\cdot T_i +Y_{i0} \cdot (1-T_i )\) , where \(T_i =1\) if the individual i is observed in period 1 and \(T_i =0\) otherwise. In a standard Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, the overall differences in means over time \(\Delta _o^\mu =\mu _1 -\mu _2 \) are broken down into two different components, the first related to the change in the returns of the set of covariates, defined the coefficient or structure effect \(\Delta _S^\mu \) and usually called the “unexplained” effect in Oaxaca decompositions, and the second determined by the different distribution of the covariates, the composition effect \(\Delta _X^\mu \) . The detailed decomposition allows to subdivide the contribution of each covariate to these two effects into the respective contributions of each covariate, \(\Delta _{S,K}^\mu \) and \(\Delta _{X,K}^\mu \) .

Fortin et al. ( 2011 ) proposed the RIF-regression method that allows us to perform a detailed decomposition for any distributional statistics for which an influence function can be computed. A RIF-regression is similar to a standard regression but the dependent variable Y, is replaced by the (re-centered) influence function of the statistic of interest. The RIF is the sum of the distributional parameter of interest and the influence function IF ( y ;  v ). This latter measures the relative effect of a small perturbation in the underlying outcome distribution on the statistic considered, detecting the contribution of each observation to the distributional parameter of interest.

Because the expected value of the RIF(y; v) coincides with the statistic of interest, the law of iterated expectations permits to express the distributional parameter v in terms of the conditional expectations of the RIF on the covariates X :

where the parameter \(\gamma ^\nu \) can be estimated by the OLS regression.

In this way, it is possible to decompose the overall difference over time of \(\nu \) , \(\Delta _O^\nu =\nu _1 -\nu _0 \) into a coefficient \((\Delta _S^\nu )\) and composition effect \((\Delta _X^\nu )\) , \(\Delta _O^\nu =\Delta _S^\nu +\Delta _X^\nu \) where:

However, a limitation of this decomposition, as discussed in Barsky et al. ( 2002 ), is that it provides consistent estimate only in the case of a linear specification of the conditional expectation, like it is expressed in Eq. ( 2 ). The solution to this problem has been proposed by Fortin et al. ( 2011 ) that suggested using a (non-parametric) reweighted approach as in DiNardo et al. ( 1996 ) to decompose the different effects. Indeed, by reweighting it is possible to construct a counterfactual distribution \(F_{Y_A^C } ( \cdot )\) that replaces the marginal distribution of X for group A with the marginal distribution of X for group B using a reweighting factor \({\Psi }( X)=\frac{\Pr ( {T=1{\vert }X})/\Pr (T=1)}{\Pr ( {T=0{\vert }X})/\Pr (T=0)}\) .

In the case of two different periods, we may be interested in what would be the distribution of the variable investigated at time 0 if individuals had the same X’s as time 1: applying this procedure it is possible to obtain a distribution of X’s in the first period equal to the distribution in the second period, so that observations that were relatively more likely in the first year than in the last are weighted up and observations that are relatively less likely are weighted down.

Than it is possible to estimate the counterfactual mean \({\bar{X}} _{01} \) and the counterfactual coefficients \({\hat{\gamma }} _{01}^\nu \) from the regression of the RIF (y; v) on the reweighted sample. Consequently, the difference \({\hat{\gamma }} _1^\nu -{\hat{\gamma }} _{01}^\nu \) reflects a true change in the relationship that links the covariates to the outcome.

In practice, they are estimated by constructing a third sample, which in this case will be the sample of individuals at time 1 with the weights of individuals at time 0, sample 01.

The detailed reweighted decomposition is thus obtained by running two Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions (Fortin et al. 2011 ):

a decomposition with sample 0 and sample 01 to get the pure composition effect,

a decomposition with sample 1 and sample 01 to get the pure coefficient effect.

So, the first effect can be divided into a pure composition effect \((\Delta _{X,p}^\nu )\) and a component measuring the specification error \((\Delta _{X,e}^\nu )\) :

While the second effect can be expressed as:

So, the overall change is given by:

In the final stage, the two components are further divided into the contribution of each explanatory variable using novel recentered influence function (RIF) regressions. These regressions estimate directly the impact of the explanatory variables on the distributional statistic of interest.

4 Empirical Results

4.1 disposable income inequality.

The first step forward to assess the evolution of objective conditions is to detect incomes inequality in six countries from 1994 to 2010 by calculating the Gini indices on disposable household incomes whose values are reported in Table  1 . What emerges is that, on the one hand, different values of these indices are observable across countries that reflect different shapes of the income distributions and can be imputed to quite different social regulations and provisions and different approaches towards social policy. In every wave, the United States and the United Kingdom show the highest values of the indices, followed by Italy, Poland, Germany and Norway. On the other hand, a general tendency towards an increasing inequality is observable during the period from 1994 to 2012 for Germany, Norway, Poland and the United States while Italy and the United Kingdom show a modest decline of the values of the indices.

To look more in depth at how incomes have evolved during the period considered and to account for individual characteristics, a focus on the whole population of the sample is provided for the first and the last year of the waves by attributing to each person the equivalent income of the household to which he or she belongs. Table  2 reports Gini indices calculated across different population subgroups. Groups are identified according to sex, education attainment, age, marital status, occupational status and type of profession. Due to data limitation some information is missing and mean and median incomes are reported in the last two rows of the table.

What emerges is that the Gini coefficients significantly increased for most subgroups in every country, with the exception of Italy and Poland, which suggests a rising inequality within different groups.

It is important to notice that a significant increase in inequality (more than 4 % within each group) between 1994/1995 and 2010 is observable in particular in two cases. First, in Germany when groups are formed according to their professional skill levels. Second, in the United States, when groups are formed on the basis of their education attainments. This means that educational attainment and professional skill levels represent factors that are less likely to create homogenous groups in terms of incomes.

Finally, numbers reveal that incomes distributions are significantly different in terms of median and average income across countries. However, some common evidence can be detected coherently with what emerged from the synthetic measures of inequality. In particular, average and median incomes significantly increase both in European countries and the USA but a further investigation (not reported here for short) reveals that rising income gaps can be detected between groups especially in the United Kingdom and the United States.

4.2 Self Perceived Social Position Inequality: Descriptive Findings

Coherently with some of the previously overviewed literature, the preliminary analysis to investigate how individuals of our sample tend to locate themselves across a social scale reveals that most people tend to locate themselves in the middle categories and the highest share of people answers category 5 or 6 in every country (Fig.  1 ). On average, after a time span of 17 years, the subjective social position declared has slightly increased, passing from a mean of 5.10 observed in 1992 to a mean of 5.30 in 2009. Some differences emerge across countries: for example, it is interesting to observe that in 1992 in Poland a significant percentage of people mentioned the low values of the scale in their answers and then compare this data with a significant variation of answers’ distribution after less than 20 years. In Italy, individual perception of their position across society has deteriorated significantly since an increasing number of people in 2009 declared to be located at the bottom of the social scale. Furthermore, in the United States more than 45 % of the population believe to be located after the middle of the social scale declaring the same value 6.

Distribution of self perceived social position by year and country

All this evidence can be resumed looking at two different measures of dispersion, the variance and the Gini index, whose values are reported in Table  3 for 1992 and 2009. The variance and the Gini index of the variable “declared position” are calculated across countries and the whole population to explore the inequalities in people’s social perception of their position across society. Both these distributional parameters decreased in the period considered in every country (Table  3 ): on average the variance diminished by around 15 %, from 3.19 to 2.71, while the Gini index reduced from 0.18 to 0.162 (with a reduction of 10 %). In particular, also countries where income polarization increases during nearly the same period like Germany, Norway, Poland and the USA show a significant decrease of the variance and the Gini index for the answers on social position perceived. In Italy, the variance and the Gini calculated on this variable increase in 2009 despite the decrease of income polarization observed by different economic studies and the analysis on disposable household income reported in the previous paragraph.

Furthermore, it is possible to observe that answers’ dispersion is the highest in Poland both in 1992 and 2009 followed by the USA, the UK, Germany and Italy in 1992 and Italy, the UK, Germany and the USA in 2009. Norway shows the lowest dispersion in both years.

Finally, in order to provide more detail on the data, Table  4 reports the distribution of the selected covariates across our sample in the two periods and the mean of subjective social position declared within each category.

As can be easily predicted and coherently with results of other empirical analysis, on average the highest values are declared by high skill professionals and high educated while unemployed, disabled and low educated declare the lowest values. In general, comparing the two years, a small increase of the mean values can be detected for all the groups of people considered.

Looking at the differences between the two sample, it is possible to observe that: (i) the percentage of postsecondary educated has grown to 37 % in 2009 compared to the 18.8 % of 1992 increasing the average level of education; (ii) the proportion of the total population in different age groups has significantly changed, since the percentage of people over 45 increased and the proportion of youth has fallen; (iii) the shares of the widowed, the separated, the divorced (included in the variable “no longer married”) and of those single increased, while the percentage of married fell from 67.6 to 57 %; (iv) regarding the employment status, there is a lower percentage of unemployed that passed from 5.5 % in the year 1992 to 4.6 % in 2009.

4.3 Determinants of Self Perceived Social Position Inequality

This part of the paper explores the determinants of the inequalities of people’s perceptions of their position in society by comparing 1992 and 2009 in order to observe changes on perceptions’ inequality and control for objective socioeconomic characteristics. Indeed, as previously discussed, the distribution of people among the hierarchical scale depends on some individual features: society can be conceived as an amalgamation of groups, where certain individuals are similar and others differ relative to some given set of attributes or observable characteristics which have an influence on self perceived social position but with a different strength over years.

As can be observed from our data, results suggest that there is an increasing homogeneity over time of people’s answers according to age, educational levels, employment status and profession. In particular, the variance of self perceived social position by age classes is significantly lower in 2009 than in 1992: for the age class between 55 and 64 years old the variance passed from 3.46 to 2.63. Similarly, the categories of self perceived social position declared by the employed in 2009 are closer to the mean, since the variance decreased by 27 %, from 3.88 to 2.82 (figures with the values of the variance for different population subgroups are reported in the Appendix).

This evidence is confirmed by the results of the RIF regressions for both periods examined, for the Gini index and the variance that are reported in Table  5 . The covariates included in the regressions reflect the different individual characteristics that have been suggested by the literature previously reported. The key set of variables are gender, age (six groups), education (three education groups), marital status (three groups), occupational status (six categories) and three hierarchical categories of profession (carried out in the present or in the past) constructed by the International Standard Classification of Occupation code, ISCO-88. Note that the base group used in the RIF-regression models consists of male, aged over 65, highly educated, married, in full time employment and with high professional skills.

Looking at the values and the relevance of the coefficients, evidence confirms that the main determinants of self perceived social position inequality are connected with occupational status, disability and educational level. This means that there is a higher heterogeneity of the answers than the base groups when groups are formed by people with disability, unemployed or people with a low educational level.

The regression results when using the Gini coefficient as the dependent variable show that the effect of low education increased with time since the association between this covariate, which increases the dispersion of the Gini, and our measure of inequality is higher in 2009 than in 1992. Considering the occupational status, it is well worth noting that having a part-time job is related to lower values (not significant) of the indices in 1992 but an inverse relationship is observable in the second year. This evidence means that in the first year observed having a part time job led to more homogeneous answers than having a full time job and that this is not true anymore in the second year. Unemployment has a positive and significant impact that becomes more evident in 2009: the mean values of the declared categories by unemployed are very low (4.59 in 1992 and 4.69 in 2009) but the results of the regressions show a great dispersion from these scores and a strong influence on the total variation registered. This evidence reveals that unemployed have a different perception of their condition which becomes even more pronounced over years and that in 2009 this status plays a weaker role to determine people’s sense of self at the bottom of the social scale.

Similarly, the disability status significantly increases the subjective social position inequality, while the effects of being a student, housewife and other inactive are never significant. Furthermore, the effect of being retired is positive and decreases over time. Being single and no longer married (widowed, separated or divorced) has a significant and positive effect regardless the period considered that can be due to the highest heterogeneity (also in terms of perception) of people within these groups. Finally, the estimated RIF-coefficients associated with professional skills are not always statistically different from zero and their impact decreases over time. However, it is possible to state that in 2009 people with a middle skill profession declare more homogenous values of self perceived social position if compared with high skill professionals.

Considering the results for the variance, the majority of the evidence emerged from the analysis of the Gini index is confirmed since the coefficients that are significant in both analyses always have the same sign and similar magnitude, given the different scale between the two inequality indices. The differences between the two models regard the statistical significance of some coefficients. In some of these cases, where just one of the two coefficients is statistically different from zero, opposite signs of the value are observable.

4.4 Decomposition Results

The observed changes in the distribution of the subjective social position inequality over the last 17 years are decomposed into a composition effect due to differences in observable covariates across population, and a structure effect due to differences in the relationship that links the covariates to the outcome.

The results of decomposition analysis of the Gini index and the variance are presented in Table  6 .

To simplify the presentation of the results, the table reports the composition effect for five sets of explanatory factors: gender, age, education, occupational status and profession. Both composition effect and coefficient effect have contributed to the change in the distribution of the categories declared by people on their location across a social scale between 1992 and 2009, but with a different strength.

Considering the impact on the change of the Gini index, the composition effect negatively influences the variation of the inequality, while the coefficient effect has a much stronger and negative impact. This means that if the distribution of the covariates across population had remained constant over time, the Gini would have decreased anyway.

Looking at the composition effect, the decreased percentage of people with a low education in 2009 (from 37.2 % in 1992 to 15.8 % in 2009) significantly reduced the total variation of the Gini. On the contrary, the composition effect is positive in the case of occupational status, but the effect is low.

Interesting evidence emerges from the analysis of the coefficient effect: as previously noticed the total impact is negative and the results indicate that −0.016 of the −0.025 decline in the Gini variation due to this effect remains unexplained since it is given by the effect of the “constant” in Table  5 . As defined in Fortin et al. ( 2011 ), in fact, the change in intercepts represents the change in the distribution for the base group used in the RIF-regression analysis. Then that component of the decomposition can be interpreted as the residual (or within-group) change for the base group. Also the effects of age, profession and occupational status contribute in the same direction to reduce within-group inequality but coefficients are smaller and not significant in the case of this index. On the contrary, gender has a positive impact in the change of the Gini index over this period (0.006).

Looking at the FFL decomposition results for the variance, Footnote 2 the composition effect is positive but very little and not significant overall. The signs of the coefficient effects are confirmed and the occupational status variables have in this case a significant effect.

5 Conclusion

The literature suggests that social class analysis should consider objective and subjective factors since different elements determine people’s aspirations and behaviour. Nonetheless, in the last few years, the economic approach to social class analysis has been mainly based on statistically measurable characteristics of individuals, such as income and consumption, while it should also consider other key elements in the evolution of living standards, such as wealth and debts, earnings’ insecurity and vulnerability, and subjective dimensions such as individuals’ perception of their social position.

The aim of this paper was to analyse whether changes in the degree of inequality within specific groups in terms of objective data are associated with similar changes in the perceptions of the members of the various groups. More precisely, the focus was on inequality in people’s self-declared position in society and its comparison with evidence in terms of income distributions and distribution of different individual characteristics.

The different steps of this research have outlined an interesting pattern. On the one hand, during the time period considered, an increasing distance between income groups is observable. On the other hand, subjective social position inequality fell between 1992 and 2009. Looking at decomposition results evidence is found that this decline does not only depend on the changes of the distribution of the covariates across population. Indeed, a significant decrease of subjective social position inequality between groups and within groups with different characteristics can be imputed to changes in the relationship between the covariates to the outcome. Looking at the whole picture this means that individual characteristics such as family disposable income, age, education, employment status and occupation play a weaker role in explaining the heterogeneity of people’s answers on their location across society. The case of the United States is emblematic: it is a high-inequality country with relatively low values of subjective social position inequality.

These results can be explained in different ways. First, individuals can have false perceptions of their incomes and their economic advantage or disadvantage compared to others. Second, the perceived distances between members of society can depend on different undetectable factors (objective or subjective) that influence the sense of identity or alienation observable within a community and it can be distributed very differently from income. This latter explanation, when evidence of an increasing income distance between social groups is found, while no increase concerns inequality in perceptions, is coherent with the “reference-groups hypothesis” according to which there is an increasing tendency for people to perceive themselves as being in the middle. Authors such as Frank ( 2007 ), Layard ( 2005 ), and Graham ( 2007 ) connected this attitude to the increasing role played by the relative social context in shaping people’s aspirations and their consciousness of quality of life. Thus, results are consistent with what Evans and Kelley ( 2004 ) pointed out: reference group forces “mitigate rather than obliterate the subjective impact of social inequalities” (Evans and Kelley 2004 , p. 29). On the contrary, opposite evidence was provided for the case of Italy. In this country, an empirical evidence of stability in the income inequality is accompanied by the worsening of confidence and expectations experienced by Italian households that shows how results can also be affected by individual trajectory in terms of social mobility as pointed out in other studies (Boeri and Brandolini 2004 ; Ricci 2016 ).

Indeed, according to this evidence there are some potential effects. In particular, these findings may describe a society within which trust and expectations about one’s personal situation and those about the country situation do not differ across the different income classes, leading to general emulative behaviour despite increasing inequality (Golinelli and Parigi 2004 ; Levine et al. 2010 ). For instance, such reasoning could explain the observed decline in aggregate saving rates in the USA. Moreover, these dynamics of perceptions may also explain the lack of reaction to the rise of economic disparities which many authors are currently debating.

Consequently, the consideration of this variable can help understand different economic phenomena. In addition, the insights derived from the integrated approach followed in this paper point out that economic analysis should take into account various dimensions. Hence, future research in this direction should be encouraged.

The ISSP asks for income classes but classes are not equal across countries.

The unadjusted change is −0.0278 and not −0.48 because the means in both distributions are imposed to be equal to 1 to avoid problems connected with the dependency of the variance on the mean.

Akerlof G, Kranton R (2000) Economics and identity. Q J Econ 115(3):715–753

Article   Google Scholar  

Andersen R, Curtis J (2012) The polarizing effect of economic inequality on class identification: evidence from 44 countries. Res Soc Stratif Mobil 30(1):129–141

Atkinson A, Brandolini A (2013) On the identification of the middle class. In: Gornick JC, Jäntti M (eds) Income inequality economic disparities and the middle class in affluent countries. Stanford University Press, Stanford

Google Scholar  

Barsky R, Bound J, Charles KK, Lupton JP (2002) Accounting for the black-white wealth gap: a nonparametric approach. J Am Stat Assoc 97(459):663–673

Blinder AS (1973) Wage discrimination: reduced form and structural estimates. J Hum Resour 8:436–455

Boeri T, Brandolini A (2004) The age of discontent: Italian households at the beginning of the decade. Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia 63:155–193

DiNardo J, Fortin NM, Lemieux T (1996) Labour market institution and the distributions of wage, 1973–1992: a semiparametric approach. Econometrica 64:1001–1044

Durkheim E (1933) The division of labour in society. Free Press, Glencore

Evans MDR, Kelley J (2004) Subjective social location: data from 21 nations. Int J Public Opin Res 16(1):3–38

Firpo S, Fortin N, Lemieux T (2009) Unconditional quantile regressions. Econometrica 77(3):953–973

Fortin N, Lemieux T, Firpo S (2011) Decomposition methods in economics. In: Ashenfelter O, Card D (eds) Handbook of labor economics 4A. North Holland, Amsterdam

Frank RH (2007) Falling behind. How rising inequality harms the middle class. University of California Press, Berkeley

Graham C (2007) What happiness research can (and cannot) contribute to policy reforms: lessons from research on Latin America and beyond, draft presented at the World Bank workshop fiscal incidence and the middle class: implications for policy, June 5

Golinelli R, Parigi G (2004) Consumer sentiment and economic activity: a cross country comparison. J Bus Cycle Meas Anal 1(2):147–172

Gornick JC, Jäntti M (eds) (2013) Income inequality: economic disparities and the middle class in affluent countries. Stanford University Press, Stanford

Hodge RW, Treiman DJ (1968) Class identification in the United States. Am J Sociol 73(5):535–547

Jackman MR, Jackman R (1973) An interpretation of the relation between objective and subjective social status. Am Sociol Rev 38:569–582

Kahneman D, Slovic P, Tversky A (1982) Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Cambridge University Press, New York

Book   Google Scholar  

Kelley HH (1967) Attribution theory in social psychology Nebraska. Simp Motiv 15:192–238

Kelley J, Evans MD (1995) Class and class conflict in six western nations. Am Sociol Rev 60(2):157–178

Krugman P (2014) Redefining the middle class, 14 February 2014. http://truth-out.org/

Layard R (2005) Happiness: lessons from a new science, Penguin Press, New York

Levine AS, Frank RH, Dijk O (2010) Expenditure cascades. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1690612

Lindemann K (2007) The impact of objective characteristics on subjective social position. Trames 11:54–68

Lora EA, Fajardo AG (2011) Latin American middle classes: the distance between perception and reality. IDB Working Paper, N. IDB-WP-275

Lora EA, Fajardo AG (2015) Feeling middle class and being middle class: what do subjective perceptions tell us? Latin America’s emerging middle classes, pp 173–185

Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database (2015) http://www.lisdatacenter.org (multiple countries; data run in July 2015). LIS, Luxembourg

Marx K (1844) [1972], Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844: selections. Trans Martin Milligan. In: Tucker R (ed) The Marx–Engels reader. W.W. Norton, New York

Marx K, Engels F (1968) The communist manifesto. Selected works. International Publishers, New York

North DC (1990) Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Oaxaca R (1973) Male–female wage differentials in urban labor markets. Int Econ Rev 14:693–709

Ricci CA (2016) The mobility of Italy’s middle income group. PSL Q Rev 69(277)

Rizzello S (2000) Economic change, subjective perception and institutional evolution. Metroeconomica 51(2):127–150

Savage M (2015) Social class in the 21st century. Penguin Books, London

Torche F, López-Calva L (2013) Stability and vulnerability of the Latin American middle class. In: Oxford development studies. Taylor & Francis Journals, vol 41(4), pp 409–435

Vanneman Pampel (1977) The American perception of class and status. Am Sociol Rev 42:422–437

Wright EO, Singelmann J (1982) Proletarianization in the American class structure. In: Burawoy M, Skocpol T (eds) Marxist inquiries: studies of labor, class and states, supplement to the American Journal of Sociology, vol 88, pp 176–209

Yamaguchi K, Wang Y (2002) Class identification of married employed women and men in America. Am J Sociol 108(2):440–475

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome, Via del Castro Laurenziano 9, 00161, Rome, Italy

Chiara Assunta Ricci

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chiara Assunta Ricci .

See Figs.  2 , 3 , 4 , and 5 .

Variance of self perceived social position by profession

Variance of self perceived social position by educational level

Variance of self perceived social position by occupational status

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Ricci, C.A. Perceived Social Position and Objective Inequality: Do They Move Together? Evidence from Europe and the United States. Ital Econ J 2 , 281–303 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-016-0037-8

Download citation

Received : 25 March 2016

Accepted : 20 June 2016

Published : 11 July 2016

Issue Date : November 2016

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-016-0037-8

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

  • Perceived social position
  • Social classes

JEL Classification

  • Find a journal
  • Publish with us
  • Track your research

Professional essay writing service

Top 100 Environmental Research Paper Topics for Your Inspiration

Why taking care of our environment is essential.

Ever since humans first appeared, our planet has provided us with all basic needs like food, air, water, and energy. However, our environment can sometimes harm us too, with natural disasters like droughts, earthquakes, landslides, and floods. In such cases, we give our best to try and figure out the leading causes for their occurrence. 

The more we learn about why something happens in nature, the better we can understand how to enhance or prevent it. As human beings, we all have some basic knowledge of the environment we live in. However, it’s essential to broaden those understandings daily and learn more about ecology and the environment. It’s the only way for us to stop the hazardous side-effects of our industrial growth from damaging the planet we live on.

environmental research paper topics

Environmental Research for Better Living

We can also help prevent the extinction of endangered or endemic species, which are an essential part of our ecosystem and could cause a disbalance in their local environment if they were to disappear. Environmental research is not just a technique for survival – it’s much more.

It is now a separate field of study led by environmental sciences to positively impact the world around us. This type of research is extensive, and there are numerous environmental research paper topics college students can choose from and explore.

Some overlap with other disciplines, and based on your preferences – be it law research paper , health, biology, chemistry, science, debate, or other – you can choose yours and explore it in great detail. Writing about the environment in research papers is yet another step to a better environment.

Not only do these environmental research paper topics dig deeper into particular burning issues, their causes, and effects, but they also provide possible solutions that could help deal with them once and for all.

What Makes an Environmental Research Topic Good

Environmental research paper topics cover numerous issues which usually overlap with chemistry, biology, oceanography, civil engineering, water resources engineering, zoology, and the gas and oil industry. Simply put, there’s a great variety of topics you can choose from.

What makes one topic better than the other, though?

  • First of all, it’s always better to choose a topic from an area of research you’re particularly interested in. For example, if you are more of a biologist, you should opt for topics covering plants, e.g., deforestation and afforestation.
  • Secondly, that would always be an advantage if you’re able to reflect on a topic from a bystander perspective. 
  • And last but not least, a powerful topic should offer solutions to a particular modern-day problem in our environment. That way, your topic will have a clear purpose.

List of the top 100 environment research paper topics

The following list of 100 environment research topics will help you find inspiration, so you’ll be able to design your topic faster and start writing your paper without further delays. 

The topics have been divided into groups for you to narrow down your search easier.

Environmental Health Topics

  • Endemic wildlife – their unique importance for nature as a whole
  • National parks and their significance for our health 
  • The global impact of tectonic movements on the world’s ecosystems
  • Lung cancer and radon – analysis and potential solutions
  • Acid rain and the harmful effects on aquatic life
  • Killing wildlife with acid rain – what can we do to prevent it?
  • How vital was prehistoric wildlife for the ecosystems we have today?
  • Air pollution and its destructive impact on health
  • Can recycling help improve the health of people worldwide?
  • What can we do to minimize the depletion of the ozone layer?
  • The depletion of the ozone layer and its harmful impacts on health?
  • GMOs, herbicides, and pesticides in food and their impact on health

Environmental Debates Topics

  • Can life on Earth co-exist with radiation? Artificial vs. natural radioactivity
  • How essential is oil for the ecosystem? Oil pollution and the oil industry
  • Is there anything we can do to reverse the ozone layer depletion?
  • Will using red lights make a significant difference in our environment?
  • When we say green energy, what do we mean? Is it green?
  • Can we redeem our planet with the use of green energy?
  • How far should humans go into meddling with extinction? Is it a natural cause?

Environmental Justice Topics

  • Does the government have the most significant impact on the recycling effort of the country?
  • Do we use the total capacity of science to impact climate change?
  • Nuclear power – the importance for the environment and its role in foreign policies
  • Freight transport is a major cause of greenhouse gases emission – how can we reduce it?
  • The hospitality industry and the environmental management

Environmental Science Topics

  • Industrial plants and their connection to water resources – are they a great cause for human diseases?
  • Switching to hydrogen from fossil fuels – why is it beneficial for the world?
  • How can we stop the destruction of coral reefs?
  • The contamination of our soil – to what extent are wastes and pesticides responsible for it?
  • The acidification of the ocean – how big a problem is it?
  • The melting of permafrost and its impact on climate change
  • Global warming – busting all myths about it
  • The increased concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere – downsides
  • Small water resources and their importance for the environment
  • Acid rains and industrialization – what’s the link?

Environmental Controversial Topics

  • The impact of toxic waste on our environment
  • The causes and effects of global warming – what can we expect in the next decade?
  • Can people make use of the greenhouse effect?
  • The depletion of the ozone layer, the current situation, and prospects
  • If all ice glaciers in the world melt from global warming – what can we expect?
  • How important is recycling? Is it a safety strategy or a business?

Environmental Persuasive Speech Topics

  • What strategic actions can we implement to save our environment?
  • Conservation – an analysis
  • How can Donald Trump help save our planet?
  • To what extent should humans be concerned about endangered species, and how can they help stop their extinction?
  • Deforestation – causes, dangers, and effects on our modern world
  • The destruction of wildlife in the Amazon forest – impacts
  • Afforestation – is it possible? Can it help save a dying planet?

Environmental Biology Topics

  • Asthma attacks and the environmental influence on them
  • The effects of genetic diseases on humans
  • Roots of plants – a comparative study
  • Photosynthesis is different in some plants – a comparative study
  • Crustaceans and their importance for the environment
  • Why do we call Earth a living organism?
  • Invasive species and their impact on the environment
  • Soil composition – is it the same everywhere, and why not?
  • Viruses in nature – an analysis of how they work
  • The different types of trees in your local area
  • If honey bees become extinct, what would the effects on nature be? 

Environmental Chemistry Topics

  • The scientific standpoint for climate change 
  • Scientific examination and critic reviews on climate change
  • The spread of harmful and dangerous microorganisms and farm chemicals
  • How does farming affect the environment? Are there dangers to it?
  • The contamination of groundwater – causes and risks
  • The destruction of the forest ecosystem and its coping mechanisms
  • Bush burning – the hazardous effects on the environment
  • GMOs, pesticides, and herbicides – how do they impact our lives
  • Spraying vegetables with chemicals – pros and cons
  • The oil pollution and the dangers for wildlife 

Environmental Economic Topics

  • Air pollution and urban migration – is there a link?
  • Modernization and noise pollution
  • If we harness solar energy, will we make a good impact on the environment?
  • The Gulfstream and its importance in the world’s economy
  • The impact of the technological advancements on the environment
  • Technology and the environment – benefits & downsides
  • Ecology in the world today and prospects for the next decade

Environmental Argument Topics

  • The impact of the environmental issues on the world as a whole 
  • Our planet Earth and its desertification – causes & effects
  • Can we make a significant change in the environment with sustainable consumption?
  • The implementation of sustainable consumption and prospects
  • PET bottles – what’s unsafe about them? Can they kill you?
  • The parameters for the quality of the sol and the impact of drought on it
  • Cattle grazing and GMOs – their effect on the production of greenhouse gas

Environmental History Topics

  • EPA – the hazardous waste
  • Exxon Valdez and Santa Barbara oil spills
  • The Love Canal Case and the Eastman Kodak Case
  • The 1978 Three Mile Island
  • A comparative analysis of the most prominent earthquakes throughout history
  • A comparative analysis of the most prominent floods throughout history
  • A comparative study of the most prominent landslides throughout history
  • Norman Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation in the Green Revolution
  • The SARE/LISA and the USDA programs on sustainable agriculture
  • The emergence of agricultural biotechnology

Environmental Law Topics 

  • Human vs. animal rights
  • Would implementing tax payments for carbon emissions help minimize them?
  • Making vegetarianism mandatory – pros and cons
  • If governments ban GMOs, what can we expect?
  • The future of agriculture and organic farming
  • Exports of animals – should governments ban them?
  • Zoos – should governments ban them?
  • Selling fur – should the government of each country ban it?
  • Should we make the selling of plastic bags illegal?
  • The impacts of tourism on our environment

We hope that these classified lists of environment project topics will help you find your most suitable pick. Whichever option you choose from, be it from the group of environmental science research topics or a research connected to environmental justice, you should always present both the supporting and opposing views.

Note that you have to set an academic goal before you start writing an essay. Therefore, make sure that the topic you choose can accomplish it. If you need help with research paper choice, writing, or else, you can always consult our experts. 

If you think that would be too strenuous, buying research paper is another option many people resort to.

Order your paper now!

Related Posts

  • 100+ Best Science Topics for Research Papers
  • Cultural Research Paper Topics
  • Entrepreneurship Research Paper Topics
  • 100+ Best Religion Research Paper Topics in 2023
  • 110 Unique Tranding Fashion Research Paper Topics and Ideas

social position research paper

IMAGES

  1. 20:20 Social Position Paper on Social Business Strategy

    social position research paper

  2. Research-Position-Paper-Guidelines

    social position research paper

  3. 20:20 Social Position Paper on Social Business Strategy

    social position research paper

  4. Position Paper Example

    social position research paper

  5. Sample Position Paper (500 Words)

    social position research paper

  6. Social Media position paper

    social position research paper

VIDEO

  1. 💯10th social studies full clarity paper|ap sa1 10th class social studies question paper 2023-24

  2. 10th social science half yearly question paper 2023

  3. Composing a Research Report on a Relevant Social Issue || Grade 10 English Quarter 4 Week 7

  4. Finding HIGH-Impact Research Topics

  5. Social Research, Research Methods, शोध की पद्धतियां

  6. January 28, 2024

COMMENTS

  1. An empirical analysis of White privilege, social position and health

    In this paper, we investigated how perceptions of inequality, subjective and objective social status affected the health and well-being of N=630 White residents in three Boston neighborhoods lying on a social gradient differentiated by race, ethnicity, income and prestige. Outcomes were self-rated health, dental health, and happiness.

  2. PDF Nber Working Paper Series Social Position and Fairness Views

    Social Position and Fairness Views Kristoffer B. Hvidberg, Claus Kreiner, and Stefanie Stantcheva NBER Working Paper No. 28099 November 2020 JEL No. D1,D63,D8,H20,H31 ABSTRACT How well do people know their social position relative to others in society and how does their position shape their views on the fairness of unequal outcomes?

  3. Social Position and Social Status: An Institutional and Relational

    1 Altmetric Explore all metrics Abstract In this article, I discuss the concepts of social position and social status, the types of social position, as well as the determinedness of social statuses by the given positions in a new approach.

  4. PDF Social Positions and Fairness Views on Inequality

    sity, CEPR, and NBER (e-mail: [email protected]). This paper is a substantially revised version of a working paper previously circulated under the title \Social Position and Fairness Views." We thank Beatrice Ferrario, Leonardo D'Amico, Ida Maria Hartmann and Isabel Skak Olufsen for excellent research assistance.

  5. Perceived social position and health: Is there a reciprocal

    Based on the hypothesis that health can also affect perceived social position, in this paper we used structural equation modeling to examine whether perceived social position and three different health outcomes were reciprocally related in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a longitudinal cohort study of older adults in the United States ...

  6. Review and critique of the main conceptions of social position, status

    As an example, according to the holist perspective, the "social position" is relatively constant, according to the individualist, it is contingent and variable; according to the structuralist perspective, the "social position" is objective or factual, according to the normativist, it is normative; in rationalist approach, the "social position" i...

  7. (PDF) Social Position and Social Status: An Institutional and

    Zoltán Farkas University of Miskolc Abstract and Figures In this article, I discuss the concepts of social position and social status, the types of social position, as well as the...

  8. PDF Social Position and Fairness Views National Bureau of Economic Research

    Social Position and Fairness Views Kristoffer B. Hvidberg, Claus Kreiner, and Stefanie Stantcheva NBER Working Paper No. 28099 November 2020, Revised February 2021 JEL No. D1,D63,D8,H20,H31 ABSTRACT We link survey data containing Danish people's perceptions of where they rank in various reference groups and fairness views with ...

  9. Social Positions and Fairness Views on Inequality

    DOI 10.3386/w28099 Issue Date November 2020 Revision Date July 2022 We link survey data on Danish people's perceived income positions and fairness views on inequality within various reference groups to administrative records on their reference groups, income histories, and life events.

  10. PDF Researcher Positionality

    This paper explores researcher positionality and its influence on and place in the research process. Its purpose is to help new postgraduate researchers better understand positionality so that they may incorporate a reflexive approach to their research and start to clarify their positionality.

  11. Position, Role, and Status: A Reformulation of Concepts

    As a consequence little actual research in the area of group structure has been done using the idea of social position as a primary tool of analysis. Fourth: The concept of social position depends on an imperfect spatial analogy since it allows a given individual to occupy two positions in the same social space at the same time. This can be

  12. Social positioning: a way to link social identity and social

    SUBMIT PAPER. Social Science Information. Impact Factor: 1.1 / 5-Year Impact Factor: 1.3 . JOURNAL HOMEPAGE. ... A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar. Billig, M. (1988) "Social Representation, Objectification and Anchoring: A ... Sage Research Methods Supercharging research opens in ...

  13. Rethinking Social Roles: Conflict and Modern Life

    Foucauldian-inspired research on motherhood focuses on specifying widely held ... such as mothers, might intelligently interpret, revise and seek recognition for how well they enact their social 'position'. ... She has published papers on the social politics of breastfeeding, abortion and sex education, and the significance of maternal ...

  14. Position Paper

    Definition: Position paper is a written document that presents an argument or stance on a particular issue or topic. It outlines the author's position on the issue and provides support for that position with evidence and reasoning.

  15. Studying Socioeconomic Status: Conceptual Problems and an Alternative

    Socioeconomic status (SES; or social class) is considered an important determinant of psychological and life outcomes. Despite this importance, how to appropriately conceive of and measure it remains unsettled.

  16. PDF Social Position and Social Status: An Institutional and Relational

    terms social position, social location, class position, social status, or social situa-tion for the naming of these concepts. While discussing the conceptions of other researchers, in the Introduction I occasionally mark the concepts in question with the term "social position," and I put that term between quotation marks. However,

  17. The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts

    research in the current context is that it focuses on income rather than class. Although these variables are clearly connected, class is generally thought to be indexed by more than income. The research nevertheless suggests that economic inequality plays a key role in shaping the attitudes and behaviours of higher‐class individuals.

  18. Social Position and Fairness Views

    People know their income positions well, but believe others are closer to themselves than they really are. The perceived fairness of inequalities is strongly related to current social position, moves with shocks to social position (e.g., unemployment or promotions), and changes when people are experimentally shown their actual positions.

  19. Exploring the Relationship between Social Class and Quality of Life

    Respondents ranged across the full spectrum of social class (see. Figure 1) and indicated a social class slightly below the scale midpoint (M = 4.71, SD = 1.81). When considering more objective indicators of social class, our sample demonstrated considerable socio-economically diversity, as individuals from all measured education and income levels were present in our sample, including high ...

  20. 8 ways Gen Z will change the workforce

    February 14, 2024 8 ways Gen Z will change the workforce. Soon there will be more Zoomers working full time than Baby Boomers. Roberta Katz explains how their values and expectations will shape ...

  21. 'It depends': what 86 systematic reviews tell us about what strategies

    The gap between research findings and clinical practice is well documented and a range of strategies have been developed to support the implementation of research into clinical practice. The objective of this study was to update and extend two previous reviews of systematic reviews of strategies designed to implement research evidence into clinical practice.

  22. (PDF) Position paper on Social Work in Kenya

    This position paper describes social work as a profession and not just a discipline. It also explores the need for a legal framework for social work as a profession, the relevance of...

  23. Should parents be able to opt their kids out of learning about race

    About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.

  24. Social Policy Experimentation: A Position Paper

    For example, the Evaluation Review, which is the journal most widely subscribed to m the field of evaluation research (which is built around social experimentation), is only 7 years old. The Evaluation Research Society is about the same age. ... Anticipating the social consequences of AIDS: A position paper. Go to citation Crossref Google ...

  25. PDF Review and critique of the main conceptions of social position, status

    concepts would be necessary to express "social position" in a wider sense. Some conceptions of "social position" have mostly been elaborated in the socio-logical theory, and these conceptions possibly have a smaller impact on empirical sociological research. Other conceptions, however, have mainly been developed in

  26. V-JEPA: The next step toward advanced machine intelligence

    V-JEPA is a non-generative model that learns by predicting missing or masked parts of a video in an abstract representation space. This is similar to how our Image Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA) compares abstract representations of images (rather than comparing the pixels themselves). Unlike generative approaches that try to fill in every missing pixel, V-JEPA has the ...

  27. Acknowledgments

    About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.

  28. Perceived Social Position and Objective Inequality: Do They Move

    According to the literature on social class analysis, both subjective and objective dimensions should be considered, since the perception of social position can influence economic behaviour and choices. The aim of this paper is to investigate objective and perceived social position inequality in six different countries from the 1990s to the 2000s in order to find out whether these dimensions ...

  29. Professional Essay Writing Service from Top Providers

    We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.