Socio-economic status,social class and memory performance: a critical response to Herrmann and Guadagno (1997)

Herrmann and Guadagno (1997) reviewed evidence concerning the relationship between memory performance and socio-economic status (SES). As a measure of social stratification, SES is narrow and ethnocentric, and it ignores the role of social prestige, power and status. The selection of research for quantitative analysis and the measure of effect size used by Herrmann and Guadagno are criticized. Across the available corpus of studies, there is a highly significant relationship between SES and memory performance, but this varies systematically from one task to another and between different research studies using the same task. This indicates that the effects of SES on memory are mediated by the content and the context of learning. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.