Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

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Cultural Capital as Class Strength and Gendered Educational Choices of Chinese Female Students in the United Kingdom

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2020.584360 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 ◽

Author(s):

Siqi Zhang ◽

Xiaoqing Tang

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Tertiary Education ◽

Female Students ◽

Educational Choices ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Middle Class Families

The present qualitative study analyzes how cultural capital, gender, class, and family involvement impact Chinese female students’ aspirations of studying in the United Kingdom. We investigated how these factors facilitate or limit female students’ choice of study destination, as well as choices of subject and program. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a British university. A total of 25 young Chinese female students from different subject areas took part in the semi-structured interviews. Out of those, five students are undergraduates, 11 are taught master’s students, and the other nine students are doctoral candidates. Most of the undergraduates and postgraduates are from middle-class families, while some of the Ph.D. students are from working-class families. The results of the content analysis were examined in light of gender and cultural capital theory. It was found that although there exist differences within the middle-class families regarding the possession of cultural capital, many female students from middle-class families obtained high levels of cultural capital, and these students usually internalized the idea of pursuing a place in the United Kingdom’s tertiary education system as a way of enhancing women’s competency in future job markets. Furthermore, compared with working-class students, many respondents’ choice of subject and program was highly gendered, as their families expect them to live a feminine life by choosing “appropriate” feminine subjects. Therefore, despite having the privilege to study abroad, female middle-class students’ educational choices are still constrained by gender and class.

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Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

Qualitative Research ◽

10.1177/14687941211034726 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 146879412110347

Author(s):

Imane Kostet

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Ethics Committees ◽

Power Dynamics ◽

Class Background ◽

Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

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“I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School

American Sociological Review ◽

10.1177/0003122411427177 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 76 (6) ◽

pp. 862-882 ◽

Cited By ~ 142

Author(s):

Jessica McCrory Calarco

Keyword(s):

Elementary School ◽

Social Class ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Help Seeking ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

Unequal Opportunities ◽

Do So

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.

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Hidden Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Class

Psychological Science ◽

10.1177/0956797616676600 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 28 (2) ◽

pp. 162-170 ◽

Cited By ~ 24

Author(s):

Sébastien Goudeau ◽

Jean-Claude Croizet

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Academic Culture ◽

Sixth Graders ◽

School Contexts ◽

Advantages And Disadvantages ◽

Regular Classrooms ◽

Working Class Students

Three studies conducted among fifth and sixth graders examined how school contexts disrupt the achievement of working-class students by staging unfair comparison with their advantaged middle-class peers. In regular classrooms, differences in performance among students are usually showcased in a way that does not acknowledge the advantage (i.e., higher cultural capital) experienced by middle-class students, whose upbringing affords them more familiarity with the academic culture than their working-class peers have. Results of Study 1 revealed that rendering differences in performance visible in the classroom by having students raise their hands was enough to undermine the achievement of working-class students. In Studies 2 and 3, we manipulated students’ familiarity with an arbitrary standard as a proxy for social class. Our results suggest that classroom settings that make differences in performance visible undermine the achievement of the students who are less familiar with academic culture. In Study 3, we showed that being aware of the advantage in familiarity with a task restores the performance of the students who have less familiarity with the task.

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Paradise Lost? Patterns and Precarity in Working-Class Academic Narratives

Journal of Working-Class Studies ◽

10.13001/jwcs.v1i1.6013 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 28-44

Author(s):

Deborah M. Warnock

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Student Debt ◽

Survivor Guilt ◽

Class Culture ◽

Class Background ◽

Impostor Syndrome

Through an analysis of eight collections of autoethnographic essays written by working-class academics and published over the span of thirty-two years, I identify stable themes and emergent patterns in lived experiences. Some broad and stable themes include a sense of alienation, lack of cultural capital, encountering stereotypes and microaggressions, experiencing survivor guilt and the impostor syndrome, and struggling to pass in a middle-class culture that values ego and networking. Two new and troubling patterns are crippling amounts of student debt and the increased exploitation of adjunct labor. I emphasize the importance of considering social class background as a form of diversity in academia and urge continued research on the experiences of working-class academics.

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Social Class Differences in Complaining Strategies Used by Customers of Central Santosa Finance

International Journal of Linguistics ◽

10.5296/ijl.v9i3.11115 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 9 (3) ◽

pp. 25

Author(s):

Insan Utama Sinuraya ◽

Chairunnissa Chairunnissa

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Content Analysis ◽

Social Class ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Class Differences ◽

Analysis Technique

This study deals with complaining strategies in different social class. The objectives of this study were to find out the types of complaining strategies used by customers as the complainers and the reasons of the customers used complaint strategies. To achieve the objectives, this study was conducted by applying qualitative research. It is a kind of multi-case study. The subjects of this study were the customers of Central Santosa Finance with different social class, namely working class and middle class. And the objects of this research were the utterances which contained complaining strategies uttered by the customers. The data were collected by using content analysis technique. The data were analyzed based on the theory of complaining strategies proposed by Trosborg (1995) and the interview was conducted to get the answer of the reasons why customers used complaint strategies. Based on the results of this study, the customers from working class dominantly used Explicit Blame and Modified Blame as their complaint strategies. While the customers from middle class tended to use Hints as their complaint strategy which meant that customers form working class were more direct in saying their complaints than customers from middle class. The reasons of they used complaint strategies were Situation and Problem.

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Researching LGBT+ Youth Intimacies and Social Media: The Strengths and Limitations of Participant-Led Visual Methods

Qualitative Inquiry ◽

10.1177/1077800418806598 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 278-288 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Kate Marston

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Social Media ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Young People ◽

Exploratory Study ◽

Lgbt Youth ◽

Visual Methods ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

The Social

This paper draws on data from an exploratory study into the social media engagements of LGBT+ young people aged 16 to 20 years old, in the United Kingdom, and considers how participant-led visual methods generated insights into different modalities of digitally mediated intimacy. It outlines the methodological paradigms dominating current research on LGBT+ young people’s digitally mediated practices of intimacy and argues that visual methods have been underemployed to date. The participatory visual methods used in this study, including map-making and digital tours of participant’s digital worlds along with visual elicitation interviews, are documented and explored in relation to Berlant’s work on intimacy and theories of networked affect. It also reflects upon the ethical implications of re-presenting social media images and troubles interpretive imperatives within qualitative research.

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Mastery of Cultural Capital, Social Class Segregation of High Schools and Winning at Sport

10.31235/osf.io/cky4u ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Pat Rubio Goldsmith ◽

Richard D. Abel

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Explanatory Power ◽

Capital Theory ◽

Class Differences ◽

Cultural Capital Theory ◽

Resistance Theory ◽

Using Data

According to cultural capital theory, middle-class families cultivate their children’s cultural capital to promote their social mobility through success in school. We advance the explanatory power of the theory by measuring cultural capital in terms of mastery rather than participation or attendance using data on more than 12 thousand schools about their success in interscholastic athletics. We find that predominantly middle-class schools win more contests and by larger margins than economically integrated and predominantly working-class schools. The margins of victory become larger as the social class differences between the opposing schools grows. We also find evidence consistent with resistance theory because predominantly working class schools also experience success, albeit relatively modest. Our findings have implications for cultural capital theory, resistance theory, and our methods for studying them. By measuring mastery of cultural capital, we identify large social class differences among participants in cultural capital and a close alignment between middle-class culture and school culture.

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