Social Class & Classism

Key terms, models, and vetted action steps from Hays & Erford, Ch. 7 — pulled from the full combined study guide for fast review. Every stat and link here has already been through a fact-check pass; anything still uncertain stays flagged.

Hays & Erford, Ch. 7 Combined guide: Week 5

Glossary

Learning Outcomes 7.1–7.5

Social class: A person's felt, lived relationship to money and status — not a single number, but a thread of identity woven through education, income, occupation, and every other identity someone carries.
Socioeconomic status (SES): The measurable side of class — the composite of a person's education level, income, and job prestige.
Overculture: The dominant, background culture of a society that quietly sets the norms individuals absorb about class.
Net worth: What someone owns minus what they owe.
Poverty: A state where what's owed outweighs what's owned, or where basic needs — food, a place to live, clothing — go unmet.
Wealth: Net worth with room to spare: enough to cover needs, save for wants, and still choose to give some away.
Classism: Prejudicial treatment of people based on their real or assumed class standing.
Psychological distancing: The mental moves privileged people make to avoid feeling implicated in class-based injustice.
Poverty attribution: The story someone tells themselves about why poverty exists — pinned on individual choices, or on policy and systemic exclusion.
Class mobility: How realistic it is for someone to shift class tiers within a lifetime — notably harder in the U.S. than in most peer nations.
"Birth lottery": Chetty et al.'s shorthand for how much a child's geography — not just their effort — predicts their odds of moving up economically.
Opportunity gap: The uneven school funding that results from tying public education dollars to local property taxes, which shortchanges students who are already low-income or students of color.
Food insecurity: Not having reliable access to enough good food — shows up as skipped meals, lower-quality options, or outright hunger.
Broaching: Bringing up a visible class gap between counselor and client yourself, instead of leaving it to the client to name first.
Cognitive dissonance: The uncomfortable mental static of holding a belief that new information keeps contradicting — expected, not a red flag, while building class awareness.

Key models

Forms of Classism

flowchart TD
    A[Classism] --> B[Downward]
    A --> C[Upward]
    A --> D[Lateral]
    A --> E[Internalized]
    B --> B1[Looking down on people lower on the class ladder]
    C --> C1[Suspicion or resentment aimed at people seen as higher-status]
    D --> D1[Sizing yourself up against peers in your own bracket]
    E --> E1[Strain from struggling to hold onto your own class position]

Advocacy — 4 levels

Professional — protect your own capacity, push for connected services, strengthen training pipelines, contribute to research
Individual/client — get concrete needs met before anything else
Community — build power together, only at the community's invitation, never handed down from outside experts
Sociopolitical — shape policy, back coverage/wages that reach everyone

Awareness → Knowledge → Skills

Awareness — write your own class story, volunteer, spend real time across class lines, take a privilege inventory
Knowledge — 5 areas to know cold: poverty's practical barriers, privilege/oppression/intersectionality, systems theory, serious mental illness, crisis and trauma
Skills — screen for resource needs alongside standard assessment, name the class gap out loud (broaching), lean on person-centered/relational technique

Action Steps & Assessments

Every URL below was checked live on 2026-07-16. 5 of 18 are dead or moved — corrected links are given where found.

Resource	Status	Note
Class Culture Traits Quiz — activistclasscultures.org	✓ live	Self-assessment + glossary
Class Action — classism.org	✓ live	Founded 2004 per current site (textbook says 1995)
Highlander Research & Education Center	⚠ moved	Now at beta.highlandercenter.org
United for a Fair Economy — faireconomy.org	✓ live	—
Children's Defense Fund — childrensdefense.org	✓ live	—
Institute for Women's Policy Research — iwpr.org	✓ live	Dropped "www"
National Center for Children in Poverty	⚠ changed	Now at Bank Street College, not Columbia
Feeding America — feedingamerica.org	✓ live	—
Living Wage Calculator	✗ dead	Use livingwage.mit.edu (MIT) instead of the old PSU link
Universal Living Wage Campaign — universallivingwage.org	✓ live	—
UC Berkeley Labor Center — laborcenter.berkeley.edu	✓ live	—
Nat'l Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty	✗ dead	Rebranded to homelesslaw.org
Access Project	✗ dead	Domain now an unrelated blog; no replacement found
Community Catalyst — communitycatalyst.org	✓ live	—
Families USA — familiesusa.org	✓ live	—
Headington Institute (self-care)	⚠ changed	Ended direct services late 2025; now grantmaking-only
"Invisibility of Upper Class Privilege" inventory	✗ dead	PDF 404s, domain squatted; try the Wayback Machine or substitute a comparable inventory
United Way — unitedway.org / 211	✓ live	—

Counseling & Social Class — Timeline Highlights

1908Frank Parsons opens the Vocation Bureau in Boston (source material's "Bureau of Vocational Guidance" was its later Harvard-era name).

1964War on Poverty declared; Economic Opportunity Act creates the Office of Economic Opportunity and community action agencies (source material's "community mental health agencies" conflates this with the 1963 Community Mental Health Act).

1999Counselors for Social Justice (CSJ) founded (April 1999); now an ACA division.

2000APA adopts the Resolution on Poverty and Socioeconomic Status (source material says 2002 — corrected here).

2010Affordable Care Act signed into law (textbook says 2009 — corrected here).

2015MSJCC endorsed by the ACA Governing Council.

2018Poor People's Campaign revived by Rev. William Barber & Liz Theoharis.

Every stat here has caveats. This sheet drops fact-check nuance for fast recall. Several stats printed in the Ch. 7 textbook itself failed fact-checking (its chronic-homelessness percentage, Seattle living-wage figure, 2014 uninsured rate, and WHO suicide percentage are wrong or unconfirmed) — verify against a primary source before citing any number in graded work.