"What does social class mean to you?" Exploring subjective understandings of social class in the United States

In psychological research on social class there is sometimes a disconnect between what researchers mean by social class and what the average person thinks about social class. This discrepancy has important implications for the way researchers communicate their research to each other and to the public and for the way people make sense of their own class identities. This study (n = 377) adds to what we know about how laypeople think about social class by asking people from different backgrounds in the United States (though still mostly White and "middle class") to describe what social class means to them and to describe what distinguishes lower, middle, and upper class individuals in three different social contexts (America in general, college, and television shows). Responses indicated a strong reliance on money and wealth-related factors to make sense of class, in particular that "lower class" people lacked money and that "upper class" people had an excess of money, and to a much lesser extent, references to more traditional class indicators like education and occupation. Responses also revealed that race is a meaningful facet of social class for many respondents, in particular "lower class" people were more frequently seen as people of color and "upper class" people more frequently seen as White. Implications for psychological research on social class are discussed.