Introduction

Perceptions of individuals are influenced by education, marital status, and income level. Our study seeks to understand more about how marital status and income level effect perception of educational attainment. Its also interesting to consider how many interactions of aspects make up socioeconomic status (SES) and what role they may have in shaping our perception of education.

Independent Variable 1: Income Level

Income level has a huge impact on SES. We wanted to understand more about how Income level can create perceptions of educational attainment. In order to manipulate income level we created four versions of a story. We included brief examples of living situations for high income and low income families. We also kept consistent language between the story examples.

Independent Variable 2: Marital Status

In the context of societal norms, marital status is an important factor. There are a variety of interactions that could be represented by marital status. We specifically focused on marriage and divorce. To understand the interaction between marital status and perception of education we incorporated divorced and married story conditions into the 4 versions. We used interchangeable language to keep consistent standardization.

Dependent Variable: Perception of Education

Perception of education is made up of individual views and beliefs of importance. It is also greatly influenced by social norms and attitudes toward education. In our society, education is a very important factor when considering someone’s SES. We measured the interaction of marital status and income level on perception of educational attainment. We did this by manipulating the IVs in story descriptions and providing questionnaires for participants to predict the individual from the story’s educational background.

Hypothesis

We first hypothesized that participants who read about divorced parents will perceive the subject with high parental income to have less education than those with low parental income. We also hypothesized that participants who read about married participants will perceive the subject with high parental income to have more education than those with low parental income. In both of these hypotheses we focused more on the relationship of marital status to the perception of education. Now looking at these in comparison with results it is reflected that income had a bigger effect on the perception of educational attainment.

Results

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The results form our survey show participants in the married and divorced story groups perceived the subject with higher income to be more educated than lower income groups.

Discussion

One strength from our study was how we used random assignments to equally distribute story descriptions to participants. Another strength was how we incorporated interchangeable language to standardize results from each of the story descriptions. One limitation can be seen in how we were unable to measure differences like gender in race and how they interact with perception of education. A second limitation we experienced was how we included a limited amount of options on our education questionnaire. This limits the full accuracy when measuring perception of education. We also did not have control over the setting in which participants took the survey because it was taken via social media. Perception is an extremely important aspect of understanding the world around us. We use it in our day to day when interacting with new people and situations.

Take Home Message

Aspects like marital status, income level, and education make up socioeconomic status. Perceptions of these factors are influenced by societal norms and understandings of the world around us. It will be interesting to see what future research is done to understand more about other factors that may influence educational attainment.