心理学研究中社会阶层的操作化界定及其衍生问题

个体的社会阶层反映了其所掌控的客观社会资源(即客观社会阶层)和其主观上所感知到的自身社会地位(即主观社会阶层)的水平。收入(或财产)、职业、受教育程度是研究中常用来反映客观社会阶层的操作化指标。而主观社会阶层的操作化界定既包括对主观阶层进行问卷测量,也包括对其加以实验操纵。心理学研究要基于研究目的以及要考察的具体效应与机制对不同的操作化界定加以取舍,有时也要综合兼顾多种操作化方式。通过选取典型群体来代表不同阶层,这种做法宜慎重采用。同时研究的信效度问题有必要更多加以重视。未来研究应加强关注阶层认同偏差与阶层纵向流动等基础问题,以及因取样偏差而带来的阶层效应被简化的现象,并结合跨文化视角分析不同文化下社会阶层的内涵差异。

The operational definitions of social class and the related issues in psychological research

In general,social class is a kind of social classification standard used to reflect the relative position of individuals in the social hierarchy.A person’s social class is defined as the objective social resources he controls(i.e.objective social class)and the level of his own social status he subjectively perceives(i.e.subjective social class).How to operationalize the concept of social class in psychological research?This is the first issue many researchers in this field have to face.Income(or property),occupation and education level are operational indicators commonly used in research to reflect the objective social class.However,these three indicators,as the operational definition of objective social class,have certain defects.In terms of income and property,participants are usually reluctant to tell researchers their real levels.For occupations,individuals of the same occupation may have different social status.As for the level of education,people’s level of education is not always a good indicator of their actual social status.In short,all the three operational definitions are somewhat inadequate.Therefore,researchers sometimes measure multiple indicators at the same time and combine these scores into a total score of objective class.The operational definition of subjective class includes both questionnaire measurement and experimental manipulation.In addition to manipulating the participants’subjective class,researchers sometimes also want to know the participants’evaluation of other people’s social class and whether this perception of other people’s class will affect their psychological and behavioral results.Therefore,in such studies,researchers need to manipulate the social class of persons in their experimental materials.It can be seen that the operational indicators of social class are very complicated,therefore,how to choose the appropriate operational definition in the study has become a problem.To this end,we put forward the following four suggestions.First,when considering the selection of operational indicators,it should be based on the research purpose and the hypothesized effects and mechanisms and make clear which aspect of social class the research focuses on.Second,if we want to explore the effect of social class in general,we can consider using multiple operational definitions in the study.Third,it is not advisable to distinguish the social class level by selecting typical high-level and low-level class groups.Finally,we suggest that future researchers in this field should pay more attention to strengthening the reliability and validity of the empirical studies,and present more relevant information in the articles.Due to the complexity,there are still some problems to be further studied around the operational definition of social class.Future researchers should explore in depth the deviation between subjective class and objective class caused by class identification bias,as well as the inconsistency between static social class and dynamic social class caused by social class mobility.Moreover,the simplification of the effect of social class caused by sampling should also be further studied by researchers.In addition,it is also worth exploring to understand the differences between people’s definitions of social class with a cross-cultural perspective.