Table 1.
Theoretical Definitions of Socioeconomic Status
| Definitions | Percentage | Number (n = 162) | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| None given | 79.60 | 129 | — |
| Defined by indicators | 2.50 | 4 | “Class is usually defined by parental educational attainment (at least one parent with a bachelor’s or more advanced degree vs. neither parent with a degree; . . . ) or one’s own educational attainment when non-student samples are used.” (Varnum et al, 2012, p. 518) |
| Material resources | 6.20 | 10 | “Social class—people’s relative standing in society based on wealth and/or education” (Dubois et al., 2015, p. 437) |
| Perception of position in hierarchy | 5.60 | 9 | “Social class is a multidimensional construct that encompasses people’s objective resources (i.e., income, education, parental education) as well as their subjective assessments of their standing in society (e.g., subjective rank).” (Belmi et al., 2019, p. 2) |
| Position in hierarchy | 2.50 | 4 | “SES can be defined as a representation of an individual’s relative position in an economic-social-cultural hierarchy tied to power, prestige, and control over resources.” (Hittner et al., 2018, p. 1479) |
| Proxy for causal mechanisms | 1.20 | 2 | “SES is, at best, a proxy measure that in fact represents a spectrum of factors which may or may not have causal effects on reading skills or prerequisite skills.” (Corso et al., 2016, p. 34) |
| Result of inequality | 0.60 | 1 | “This wealth inequality yields differences in people’s relative social ranks that can be referred to by either social class or socioeconomic status (SES).” (Greitemeyer & Sagioglou, 2016, p. 178) |
| System of hierarchy | 1.90 | 3 | “One of the most prominent systems of hierarchy is socioeconomic status (SES), through which societies rank individuals based on their access to both symbolic and tangible resources such as wealth, education, and prestige. . . . SES is a system of stratification, in which individuals are ranked based on access to material and social resources.” (Miyamoto et al., 2018, p. 428) |
Note: Percentages were obtained by dividing by the total number of codes that were applied to definitions rather than the number of definitions or studies given. Because some definitions satisfied multiple codes, the number of codes exceeds the number of studies.