Written by Daniel J. Mulligan, MA, on behalf of the Atlanta Behavioral Health Advocates
Years ago, I casually dropped the acronym “SES” while discussing research with a friend who works as a nurse. When he asked what it meant, I was a bit surprised. Isn’t socioeconomic status (SES) common parlance in all healthcare fields?
Back then, I wanted to spread the good news about SES, this ingenious quantitative measurement that psychologists use to condense many forms of social and economic advantage into one variable. Looking back now as I finish my dissertation, I see things very differently.
I’ve realized that like my friend, I did not know what SES meant, and I’m not sure anyone does. More importantly, I argue that the way psychologists conceptualize social inequality as SES has harmful downstream consequences for millions of the most vulnerable people we study in psychology.
Our first problem is that social scientists cannot agree on the answer to this question. A recent review of articles published between 2000 and 2019 found researchers used 149 different measures of SES (Antonoplis, 2022). What’s more concerning is that 80 percent of those studies did not even define SES.
Most definitions agree that SES is a single number that ostensibly represents access to valued resources (Oakes & Rossi, 2003). Classically, SES has been defined in terms of income, education, and occupation (APA, 2007). But the list of socioeconomic resources relevant to psychological functioning also includes wealth, debt, benefits, prestige, social capital, and many neighborhood factors (WHO, 2010).
Because SES has no consensus definition, researchers focus on different sets of these resources, proceed to measure them in different ways, and then dub the end product “SES.” Consequently, researchers refer to different constructs with the same label (Braveman et al., 2005). Simply put, if one study includes debt in their measure of SES and another does not, they are measuring two different things.
But there’s a deeper technical problem here. Even if psychologists could agree on the list of resources that “truly” constitute SES, they have no good way to combine measures of these........