Our fellow APA blog for graduate psychology students, GradPsych Blog, has a great post up about the need for socioeconomic status to be incorporated into psychology training. We have cross-posted it below:
By Kipp Pietrantonio, PhD (Member, APA Committee on Socioeconomic Status)
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” yet inequality is at an all-time high in the United States.
Within the field of psychology we continue to perpetuate middle class ideology in terms of clinical practice normed for middle class people, research subject selection, and theory development. Socioeconomic status (SES) as an area of cultural competency lags behind other multicultural areas. The SES literature currently does not even have congruent language for describing SES. Terms such as social economic status, cultural capital, tax bracket, and social prestige–along with others–are used interchangeably to describe and measure a spectrum of social class variables.
Read the rest of the blog post here.