Socioeconomic status

Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power (social and political). It is a hierarchy within groups that ascribe them to different levels of privileges. As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit.

In modern Western societies, social stratification is defined in terms of three social classes: an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class; in turn, each class can be subdivided into an upper-stratum, a middle-stratum, and a lower stratum. Moreover, a social stratum can be formed upon the bases of kinship, clan, tribe, or caste, or all four.

A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common ones being: the working class, the middle class and the upper class. Membership of a social class is commonly considered dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.

Class is a subject of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and social historians. The term has a wide range of sometimes conflicting meanings, and there is no broad consensus on a definition of class. Some people argue that due to social mobility, class boundaries do not exist. In common parlance, the term social class is usually synonymous with socioeconomic class, defined as "people having the same social, economic, cultural, political or educational status", e.g. the working class, "an emerging professional class" etc. However, academics distinguish social class from socioeconomic status, using the former to refer to one's relatively stable cultural background and the latter to refer to one's current social and economic situation which is consequently more changeable over time.

Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, opinion, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others".

The term identity politics dates to the late twentieth century, although it had precursors in the writings of individuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frantz Fanon. Many contemporary advocates of identity politics take an intersectional perspective, which they argue accounts for a range of interacting systems of oppression that may affect a person's life and originate from their various identities. To these advocates, identity politics helps center the experiences of those they view as facing systemic oppression so that society can better understand the interplay of different forms of demographic-based oppression and ensure that no one group is disproportionately affected by political actions. Contemporary identity labels—such as people of specific race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age—are not mutually exclusive but are, in many cases, compounded into one when describing hyper-specific groups. An example is that of African-American homosexual women, who can constitute a particular hyper-specific identity class.

In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent).

Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation and distinction of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word "accent" may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word "dialect" encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. "Accent" is often a subset of "dialect".

Stigma, originally referring to the visible marking of people considered inferior, has evolved to mean a negative perception or sense of disapproval that a society places on a group or individual based on certain characteristics such as their socioeconomic status, gender, race, religion, appearance, upbringing, origin, or health status. Social stigma can take different forms and depends on the specific time and place in which it arises. Once a person is stigmatized, they are often associated with stereotypes that lead to discrimination, marginalization, and psychological problems.

This process of stigmatization not only affects the social status and behavior of stigmatized persons, but also shapes their own self-perception, which can lead to psychological problems such as depression and low self-esteem. Stigmatized people are often aware that they are perceived and treated differently, which can start at an early age. Research shows that children are aware of cultural stereotypes at an early age, which affects their perception of their own identity and their interactions with the world around them.

An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. Originally, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person's estimated mental age, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person's chronological age. The resulting fraction (quotient) was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score. For modern IQ tests, the raw score is transformed to a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. This results in approximately two-thirds of the population scoring between IQ 85 and IQ 115 and about 2 percent each above 130 and below 70.

Scores from intelligence tests are estimates of intelligence. Unlike quantities such as distance and mass, a concrete measure of intelligence cannot be achieved given the abstract nature of the concept of "intelligence". IQ scores have been shown to be associated with factors such as nutrition, parental socioeconomic status, morbidity and mortality, parental social status, and perinatal environment. While the heritability of IQ has been studied for nearly a century, there is still debate over the significance of heritability estimates and the mechanisms of inheritance. The best estimates for heritability range from 40 to 60% of the variance between individuals in IQ being explained by genetics.

Socioecology is the scientific study of how social structure and organization are influenced by an organism's environment. Socioecology is primarily related to anthropology, geography, sociology, and ecology. Specifically, the term is used in human ecology, the study of the interaction between humans and their environment. Socioecological models of human health examine the interaction of many factors, ranging from narrowest (individual behaviors) to broadest (federal policies). The factors of socioecological models consist of individual behaviors, sociodemographic factors (race, education, socioeconomic status), interpersonal factors (romantic, family, and coworker relationships), community factors (physical and social environment), and societal factors (local, state, and federal policies.

Socioeconomic mobility in the United States refers to the upward or downward movement of Americans from one social class or economic level to another, through job changes, inheritance, marriage, connections, tax changes, innovation, illegal activities, hard work, lobbying, luck, health changes or other factors.

This mobility can be the change in socioeconomic status between parents and children ("inter-generational"); or over the course of a person's lifetime ("intra-generational"). Socioeconomic mobility typically refers to "relative mobility", the chance that an individual American's income or social status will rise or fall in comparison to other Americans, but can also refer to "absolute" mobility, based on changes in living standards in America.

Feminization of poverty refers to a trend of increasing inequality in living standards between men and women due to the widening gender gap in poverty. This phenomenon largely links to how women and children are disproportionately represented within the lower socioeconomic status community in comparison to men within the same socioeconomic status. Causes of the feminization of poverty include the structure of family and household, employment, sexual violence, education, climate change, "femonomics" and health. The traditional stereotypes of women remain embedded in many cultures restricting income opportunities and community involvement for many women. Matched with a low foundation income, this can manifest to a cycle of poverty and thus an inter-generational issue.

Entrepreneurship is usually perceived as the cure-all solution for deprivation depletion. Advocates assert that it guides to job design, higher earnings, and lower deprivation prices in the towns within it happens. Others disagree that numerous entrepreneurs are generating low-capacity companies helping regional markets.

Psychological resilience, or mental resilience, is the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.

The term was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by psychologist Emmy Werner as she conducted a forty-year-long study of a cohort of Hawaiian children who came from low socioeconomic status backgrounds.

The Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, is an Episcopal parish church in the progressive Anglo-Catholic tradition. It is part of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania and is located in the Philadelphia Main Line.

Good Shepherd offers a robust program of high church Anglican worship, using the Book of Common Prayer (1979). The church welcomes all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or socioeconomic status.