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Drawing from both social justice and deprivation research, we conceptualize expressions of sense of deprivation (equated with sense of injustice) as a three-faceted structure de®ned by mode of experience, social reward, and social sphere of allocation. To empirically verify the ®t between this conceptual structure and the actual con®guration of people's deprivation reactions, we use a research model of two modes of experience (cognition and emotion), three classes of rewards (instrumental, relational and symbolic), and two social spheres of allocation (school and society at large). A Similarity Space Analysis (SSA) of 17 measures (that represents this model with data collected among Israeli adolescents) reproduced the three-dimensional structure of sense of deprivation, although not all hypothesized af®nities and distances between measures were empirically reconstructed.

Choice of institution and field of study for a bachelor's degree in Israel was found essentially meritocratic although influenced by socioeconomic status (SES) as well. As expected, students of higher ability attend universities and those of lower apply to academic colleges. However, among students of higher ability, those of higher SES opt for prestigious professions, such as medicine and law, or natural or social sciences, while those of lower SES choose economics and management, computer science, paramedical professions, and engineering. For students of lower learning ability, the differentiating effect of SES is smaller. Those of higher SES prefer university to college, even if they have to study in a less prestigious field, such as education or the humanities. On the other hand, students of lower ability and lower SES apply to colleges for studies such as education, social sciences, computer science, economics and management, and engineering. Overall, students who master financial resources and higher cultural capital prefer more 'theoretical' fields in a more extended course of study, while students of lower SES assume more 'practical' studies, which will enable them a faster entry to paying positions on the job market.

School integration (desegregation) was introduced in Israeli junior high schools in 1968 with the aim of increasing educational equality and decreasing (Jewish) ethnic divides. While never officially abandoned, a de facto retreat from this policy has been observed since the early 1990s, despite the voluminous research that revealed its positive, though moderate, educational outcomes. This shift in educational emphases reflected profound societal changes, fed by global neo-liberal trends and educational consumerism, which research-based arguments supporting integration were too weak to resist. The ascent and waning of school integration in Israel provide an instructive case for analysing the interconnection of educational policy, educational research, and societal changes, demonstrating the weakness of research in sustaining educational policy in the face of counteracting social and political developments.