Examining the role of perceived prestige in the link between students’ subjective socioeconomic status and sense of belonging

Abstract

Low socioeconomic status (SES) students have a lower sense of belonging to college than high-SES students. Due to the importance of sense of belonging in the college pathway, understanding the reason for this relation is particularly important. Here, we argue that in addition to having less access to resources, low-SES students in the college context also perceive themselves as having lower prestige than their high-SES counterparts. Thus, in the present research, we tested perceived prestige as a mediator of the link between subjective SES and sense of belonging to college. We conducted 3 studies in 2 different countries (USA and China), and these investigations provided evidence that the lower students’ subjective SES, the lower their self-attributed prestige, and that prestige mediated the relation between students’ subjective SES and their sense of belonging to college. The implications of these findings for understanding the collegiate experience of low-SES students are discussed.

Socioeconomic Status and Psychological Well-Being: Revisiting the Role of Subjective Socioeconomic Status

“…As in the case of objective SES, subjective SES is commonly assessed using the MacArthur SSS scale in undergraduate (Jury et al, 2019;Loeb and Hurd, 2019) and community-based (Bjornsdottir et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2019) samples. However, studies that use this measure among adolescents are becoming more frequent (e.g., Joffer et al, 2019;Moor et al, 2019).…”

A registered report on how implicit pro-rich bias is shaped by the perceiver's gender and socioeconomic status

“…For example, this may come from the experiencing downward social comparisons that may conflict with where individuals feel they stand in a given social hierarchy (see [ 23 , 95 , 128 ]) and a perceived lack of fit in certain elite institutions (e.g. universities: [ 89 , 93 , 94 , 97 ]). Future research could shed more light on this question by using a measure that directly measures ambivalence towards the rich and the poor.…”

“…However, the implications of contact with the rich probably differ depending on the income of the student or the student's family. In low-income but highly educated individuals, pro-wealthy associations brought about by familiarity with upper-class peers may be offset to some degree by difficulties in navigating cultural differences across class lines [89,[93][94][95]. Indeed, research has identified the academic context as a potential threat to the class identity of middle-class or first-generation students at elite universities, resulting in greater stress [96] and need for self-regulation [97].…”

“…[ 72 ]), advanced education as a component of SES also has a cultural component [ 87 , 88 ], which may further enhance positivity towards the rich among the well educated. For example, students who pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees tend to experience greater exposure to a high-SES cultural environments (viz., academia: [ 89 , 90 ]), potentially developing more positive attitudes towards wealth and the wealthy over time as a result of their contact with a generally high-SES population (cf. [ 91 , 92 ]).…”

Introduction to the special issue on group-based inequalities in educational outcomes

“…Research has repeatedly shown that disadvantaged social groups experience a poorer sense of belonging in school than more advantaged social groups (Freeman, Anderman, & Jensen, 2007; Ostrove & Long, 2007). Jury, Aelenei, Chen, Darnon, and Elliot (2019) investigate the reason why students from working-class backgrounds report lower sense of belonging in higher education than their peers from upper middle-class backgrounds. The authors hypothesize that the relationship between social class and sense of belonging is mediated by perceptions of one’s prestige in academia.…”