Privileged to Worry: Social Class, Cultural Knowledge, and Strategies toward the Future among Young Adults

ABSTRACT

How do differences in cultural capital operate in conditions of uncertainty? Interviews with 106 young adults of different social class backgrounds demonstrate significantly different knowledge of and attitudes about the Great Recession. Upper middle class youth are the most concerned about their long-term futures in light of the economic downturn and use distinctive strategies to combat these anticipated negative consequences. In contrast, working and middle-class youth are less concerned about the recession long term and more inclined to express hopeful and individualistic attitudes about their futures. This article demonstrates that threats to the reproduction of status bring about a disposition of anxiety among the most privileged. This discomfort is the result of greater levels of cultural knowledge. Importantly, it also leads to the activation of cultural capital to ensure the reproduction of their class standing.

KEYWORDS:

• Children and youth
• inequality
• poverty and mobility
• qualitative research
• sociology of culture

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Patrick Carr, Timothy Clydesdale, Rachel Ellis, Emily Hannum, Kristen Harknett, Grace Kao, Maria Kefalas, Annette Lareau, Laura Napolitano, Aliya Rao, Steve Viscelli, and Melissa Wilde for their valuable feedback and support on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. An exception to this is recent work by Lareau (2015).

2. See also Calarco (2014b) for the importance of cultural toolkits in ambiguous situations.

3. I considered respondents’ parents to be their biological or adoptive parents, their primary guardian (such as a grandmother), and any resident stepparents or cohabiting partners of parents with whom respondents lived during childhood or adolescence. The highest occupational or educational level of any of these parents/guardians was used in determining the social class of the respondents.

4. Likely because of the geographic proximity to a number of colleges in the area and some of the recruitment methods (i.e., snowball sampling), this sample overrepresented upwardly mobile working class youth. However, despite their educational credentials, respondents with working class origins expressed the same sentiments as their peers, giving further credence to the importance of social origin in the formation of strategies for the future.

5. All names are pseudonyms. I mask the identity of respondents by referring to their alma maters by using the classifications of the schools in Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges (2012) or more general terms such as community college.

6. For the sake of clarity, I omit some filler words like “um,” or “like,” and false starts to sentences by respondents.

7. Streib (2015) also demonstrates how one’s social class of origin continues to affect cultural sensibilities into adulthood.

8. The majority of respondents, of all social classes, were currently or had previously lived at home with their parents. With very few exceptions, respondents who lived at home paid no rent and often did not pay for necessities like food. Despite this advantage, most respondents did not acknowledge this as support and regarded it as a normative arrangement.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Tevington

Patricia Tevington is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies social class and inequality, family life, and religion.