Psychological Meanings Of Social Class In The Context Of Education

This issue of JSI is an effort to engage psychologists in a critical study of social class; that is, a systematic, research-based literature focused on the exploration of the psychological meaning of social class to diverse groups of people. Because educational institutions both attempt to offer opportunity and often simultaneously reproduce existing class stratification, the context of education is an ideal stage on which to watch the dynamics and contradictions of class play out in both individual and social psychology.

• Focuses on understanding attitudes, beliefs and attributions about class.


• Examines the processes through which education may provide class mobility for some, while maintaining class status for others.


• Brings attention to the implications of a critical psychology of social class for both educational policy and practice.

Joan M. Ostrove completed her B.A. at Williams College, her Ph.D. in personality psychology and a certificate in women's studies at the University of Michigan, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She is currently an assistant professor in the psychology department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her work focuses on the connections between psychology and social structure, and she has published in the areas of social class background and the college experience, social class and health, interpersonal implications of the social representation of disability, and women's midlife personality development.

Elizabeth R. Cole received her Ph.D. in personality psychology from the University of Michigan, where she currently is an associate professor in the Women's Studies Program and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. Her research addresses teh ways that individuals' sense of themselves as connected to social groups is related to their attitudes toward public policy, the roles that they choose to play in the political sphere and how they experience their social environments. She employes both qualitative and quantitative methods. Cole has published in the areas of political participation among women who graduated from college during the late 1960s, and the role of identity and social class in women's attitudes towards abortion. Her most recent work addresses the relationship between ethnic identity and adjustment and academic achievement among African American students.