Achievement Motivation in Canadian Indian, Middle- and Working-Class Children

1965 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Cameron ◽  
Thomas Storm
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Achievement Motivation ◽  
Light Flash ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
White Children ◽  
Material Reward ◽  
Class Child ◽  
Better Than

Sixty-sis elementary school children from three sub-cultural groups (B. C. Indian, white middle- and white working-class) were given 50 trials on a concept learning task under conditions of material (candy) or non-material (light flash) reward. There was a significant interaction between subculture and reward condition, middle-class whites performing better than Indian or working-class white children under non-material reward but not under material reward. Two other results were obtained consistent with the hypothesis that middle-class children differ from the other two groups on measures related to achievement motivation. The middle-class child was more likely than his Indian or working-class peer to tell stories to projective stimuli containing achievement imagery and to prefer a larger, delayed reward to a small immediate one.

A School Communication-deficit Hypothesis of Educational Disadvantage

1983 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Young
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Communication Pattern ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Communication Failure ◽  
School Communication ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Linguistic Difference ◽  
Educational Disadvantage ◽  
Class Child

The tendency of much of the research on educational disadvantage has been to see schooling as a constant rather than a variable. Working-class disadvantage is theorized as attributable, in part, to schools valuing performances in such a way as to turn cultural or linguistic differences between children into deficits for working-class children. In this view the school is assumed to be ‘middle-class’ and thus to be well adapted to the middle-class child. However, much of the research which underpins this view can be reconstrued from a different perspective. Whatever schools do, it is for the most part mediated through verbal communication. A re-examination of communication research shows that it is possible to theorize in terms of a school communication failure rather than a working-class cultural/linguistic difference-cum-deficit. This failure is evident when school talk is examined from the standpoint of its metacognitive quality. The school communication pattern is ill adapted to both working-class and middle-class clients but middle-class children survive it better.

Object label learning by middle- and working-class, black and white, younger and older preschool children

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
VALERIE WHITTLESEY ◽  
ELIZABETH F. SHIPLEY
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Older Children ◽  
White Children ◽  
Related Target ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Inclusion Relations ◽  
First Session

The present study examined the ability of younger and older preschool children from different backgrounds (16 middle-class black, 16 middle-class white, 16 working-class black, and 16 working-class white) to map labels to objects and to establish inclusion relationships. The children were taught novel labels for perceptually related and unrelated unfamiliar objects. Although the groups were similar in their ability to comprehend the first label during the first session, white children produced the first label more. When additional labels were taught during subsequent sessions, the differences among the groups of children were augmented. Although children from all backgrounds applied labels to objects based on initial labelings, middle-class, white, and older children did this to a greater extent than working-class, black, and younger children. Evidence for the use of inclusion relations for perceptually related target objects was not found for the children; rather, the children used a mutually exclusive labeling strategy.

Social-Class Differences on the Mc Carthy Scales for Black and White Children

1975 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan S. Kaufman ◽  
Nadeen L. Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Occupational Groups ◽  
White Children ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship of social class to the cognitive and motor Indexes yielded by the McCarthy scales was explored for representative groups of black ( n = 154) and white ( n = 862) children aged 2½ to 8½ yr. For both racial groups, children categorized as middle class scored significantly higher than working-class youngsters on each of the six indexes. The pattern of mean Indexes for different occupational groups resembled the pattern of mean IQs found in previous studies.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

scholarly journals ‘A Cockroach Preserved in Amber’: The Significance of Class in Critics' Representations of Heavy Metal Music and its Fans

2014 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy R. Brown ◽  
Christine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Heavy Metal Music ◽  
The Uk

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of ‘excessive’ white heterosexual working-class femininity as a ‘constitutive limit’ of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neoliberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999–2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the ‘counter culture’, now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction.

Social Class and Code Elaboration in Oral Communication

1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Parental Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Coding

The Bernstein thesis of elaborated and restricted coding orientation in oral communication was explored at an Australian tertiary institute. A working-class/middle-class dichotomy was established on the basis of parental occupation and education, and differences in overall coding orientation were found to be associated with social class. This study differed from others in the area in that the social class groups were contrasted in the totality of their coding orientation on the elaborated/restricted continuum, rather than on discrete indices of linguistic coding.

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

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.

Sex-Role Preference and Parental Imitation within Groups of Middle-Class Whites and Lower-Class Blacks

1972 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 651-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Sex Role ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Black Boys ◽  
White Children ◽  
White Girls ◽  
Role Preference

32 second-grade children were assessed on measures of sex-role preference and parental imitation. The middle-class white boys were more masculine in preference than the middle-class white girls were feminine ( t = 3.43, p < .01), and lower-class black girls tended to be more mother imitative than the lower-class black boys were father imitative ( r = 2.09, p < .06). No such differences were found in sex-role preference for blacks or in imitation for whites. The results indicated that there was a dominant masculine influence in the development of sex-role preference among middle-class white children and a dominant feminine influence in parental imitation among lower-class black children.

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