Table II.

Definitions of commonly used indicators of SES.

Educational attainment	Income	Neighborhood disadvantage	Composite SES
Educational attainment reflects human capital. Education is usually operationalized either as the highest or average level of completion (e.g., high school, college, professional degree) or as the total number of years of education completed.	Income reflects financial or economic resources. Income is typically measured as total monthly or annual household income, typically adjusted for household size by computing an income-to-needs ratio.	Neighborhood disadvantage reflects the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood. It is typically computed by aggregating across multiple neighborhood-level measures of employment, education, and income. In addition, neighborhood measures can also capture opportunity levels in the neighborhood like access to early childcare centers and school quality.	Composite measures of SES are aggregate measures of the child’s socioeconomic environment. They can be operationalized by aggregating income, education, occupation (and other indicators) in measures such as the Hollingshead index, normalizing and averaging data across indicators, or constructing a composite measure using factor loadings of those indicators from a latent SES model.