title: Measuring socioeconomic status: reliability and preliminary validity for different approaches.
abstract: This study investigated issues related to commonly used socioeconomic status (SES) measures in 140 participants from three cities (Atlanta, Boston, and Toronto) in two countries (United States and Canada). Measures of SES were two from the United States (four-factor Hollingshead scale, Nakao and Treas scale) and one from Canada (Blishen, Carroll, and Moore scale). Reliability was examined both within (interrater agreement) and across (intermeasure agreement) measures. Interrater reliability and classification agreement was high for the total sample (ranger = .86 to .91), as were intermeasure correlations and classification agreement (range r = .81 to .88). The weakest agreement across measures was found when families had one wage earner who was female. Validity data for these SES measures with academic and intellectual measures also were obtained. Some support for a simplified approach to measuring SES was found. Implications of these findings for the use of SES in social and behavioral science research are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta 30303, USA. pcirino@gsu.edu
authors.forename: Paul T
authors.initials: PT
authors.lastname: Cirino
authors.forename: Christopher E
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Chin
authors.forename: Rose A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Sevcik
authors.forename: Maryanne
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wolf
authors.forename: Maureen
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lovett
authors.forename: Robin D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Morris
mesh_terms: D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012923:Social Class