Socioeconomic Status

Socioeconomic Status (S.E.S.) is a complex concept, although surprisingly most people have an intuitive measure of how to rate a person's S.E.S.. It reflects a combination of many aspects of a person, including income, power, education, occupation, etc. As mentioned it is a highly complex value (Gollnick & Chinn, 1994), as some people can be quite low in some of the above measures and yet still be considered of high S.E.S.

S.E.S. is one of the strongest indicators of academic achievement among students (Berliner, 2006. Eamon, 2002. Newcomb, et. al., 2002). Students of low S.E.S. generally not only have low school achievement, but also worse health (Duncan& Brooks‐Gunn, 2000), self-esteem, and lower expectations (Elrich, 1994). Although it is not clear precisely why it is the case, there are many possible reasons why students with low S.E.S. perform poorly at school. Some of them are:

• Students of low S.E.S. usually have more things that they are worrying about outside of school. By considering the Information Processing Model, this means that they have less capacity left over in their working memory, decreasing their ability to learn.
• Students of low S.E.S. may also develop a "resistance culture" whereby they feel that they are "selling out" if they are seen to be emulating students of higher S.E.S. by doing well at school. In this case some students may intentionally avoid activities that may lead them to succeed.

As mentioned before, students of low S.E.S. also generally have low self-esteem. This means that bullying-type behavior is more common, as this type of behavior is often in an attempt to increase someone's self-concept through reducing another person in their eyes.