Adolescents' perceptions of social status: development and evaluation of a new indicator.

By E. Goodman, Nancy E. Adler, Ichiro Kawachi, Frazier Al, Bin Huang, Graham A Colditz. Pediatrics, 2001

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OBJECTIVE Eliminating health disparities, including those that are a result of socioeconomic status (SES), is one of the overarching goals of Healthy People 2010. This article reports on the development of a new, adolescent-specific measure of subjective social status (SSS) and on initial exploratory analyses of the relationship of SSS to adolescents' physical and psychological health. METHODS A cross-sectional study of 10 843 adolescents and a subsample of 166 paired adolescent/mother dyads who participated in the Growing Up Today Study was conducted. The newly developed MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (10-point scale) was used to measure SSS. Paternal education was the measure of SES. Indicators of psychological and physical health included depressive symptoms and obesity, respectively. Linear regression analyses determined the association of SSS to depressive symptoms, and logistic regression determined the association of SSS to overweight and obesity, controlling for sociodemographic factors and SES. RESULTS Mean society ladder ranking, a subjective measure of SES, was 7.2 +/- 1.3. Mean community ladder ranking, a measure of perceived placement in the school community, was 7.6 +/- 1.7. Reliability of the instrument was excellent: the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.73 for the society ladder and 0.79 for the community ladder. Adolescents had higher society ladder rankings than their mothers (micro(teen) = 7.2 +/- 1.3 vs micro(mom) = 6.8 +/- 1.2; P =.002). Older adolescents' perceptions of familial placement in society were more closely correlated with maternal subjective perceptions of placement than those of younger adolescents (Spearman's rho(teens <15 years) = 0.31 vs Spearman's rho(teens 15 years) = 0.45; P <.001 for both). SSS explained 9.9% of the variance in depressive symptoms and was independently associated with obesity (odds ratio(society) = 0.89, 95% confidence interval = 0.83, 0.95; odds ratio(community) = 0.91, 95% confidence interval = 0.87, 0.97). For both depressive symptoms and obesity, community ladder rankings were more strongly associated with health than were society ladder rankings in models that controlled for both domains of SSS. CONCLUSIONS This new instrument can reliably measure SSS among adolescents. Social stratification as reflected by SSS is associated with adolescents' health. The findings suggest that as adolescents mature, SSS may undergo a developmental shift. Determining how these changes in SSS relate to health and how SSS functions prospectively with regard to health outcomes requires additional research.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Socioeconomic Status and Health Behaviors in Adolescence: A Review of the Literature (2007, methodology): “Future studies should employ alternative measures of SES, such as an adolescent’s perception of social status relative to others in their peer group, due to recent findings that suggest such measures may be a better predictor of adolescent health than the traditional objective measures (Goodman et a”
An examination of the validity of the Family Affluence Scale II (FAS II) in a general adolescent population of Canada (2009, background): “Several researchers have had success reducing nonresponse rates with adolescents by employing alternative measures of SES that are more familiar to adolescents (Currie et al. 1997; Goodman et al. 2001; Wardle et al. 2002).”
Best Practices in Conceptualizing and Measuring Social Class in Psychological Research (2013, methodology): “, 2000) and more recently with adolescents (Goodman et al., 2001), and elementary school children (Mistry, White, Chow, Gillien-O’Neel, & Brown, 2012).”
Social class, sense of control, and social explanation. (2009, methodology): “It is important to note that this measure of subjective SES is only moderately correlated with objective indices of SES across several studies, suggesting that this rank-based dimension of social class is likely to independently predict classrelated outcomes (Adler et al., 2000; Goodman et al., 2001”
Reliability and Validity of Family Affluence Scale (FAS II) among Adolescents in Beijing, China (2011, background): “Inconsistent or non-associations have been found between socioeconomic status (SES) and some health outcomes among adolescents (Goodman 1999; Goodman et al. 2001; Starfield et al. 2002; West 1997; West and Sweeting 2004).”
A Road Map for an Emerging Psychology of Social Class (2012, background): “In this measure, participants rank themselves in society or in one’s local community on a ladder with 10 rungs representing ascending levels of income, education, and occupation (Adler et al., 2000; Goodman et al., 2001).”