Final Summary/Reaction

As the final results of my survey came in, I was able to draw a few conclusions from my data collected. First and foremost, my hypothesis that there is classism in our immediate society was proven correct. About 57% of the survey responders have felt discriminated against and/or judged for their social class. 53% of the people had felt guilty for being more well off than others, 31% have felt inferior due to their low social class, with only 17% of the survey participants feeling neither of these feelings. I noticed that most of the people who said they did not feel like they had an important role in their society were part of the middle to lower annual income range. I had a feeling this would happen, as this is typical to a classist society. I was actually very surprised to see that about 69% of the participants said that they socialize with members of different class members frequently. Being in a not very economically diverse part of the state, it makes me wonder how accurate this number really is and who is it that these people are socializing with that are in a different social class.

Overall, I find classism to be something that is plaguing our society and needs to be stopped. It is widening the divide between social classes, and it isn't fair to discriminate someone based on their class in society. It seems like its going to be really hard to stop though, because it isn't something like racism that everyone talks about. It is more discreet and less well known. It is almost inherent in our human nature and will be very hard to stop. No law will be able to fix it. The way people feel inferior and superior to other people based on social class is something that can only be changed by the people themselves.

11 Research Update

I have put my survey onto facebook about a week ago. I put it in the IHA Class of 2015 facebook group as well as on my own timeline. I have gotten a lot of responses so far and am noticing some patterns already, as well as some early flaws in my survey and research method. First of all, I know right off the bat that the my results are biased. The majority of my responses are from female participants. Second, most of my survey participants are in the upper middle classes, so I really can't get a good representation of the lower classes. I had anticipated this before I sent the survey out though. From what I have seen so far, it seems that there are definite aspects of classism in our society. The results indicate that over half of the survey participants have felt guilty for being "more well off" than those around them. There were people who felt inferior because they aren't as wealthy, but this number was significantly lower, due to the fact that most recipients were in the higher classes. According to my responses so far, although there is classism in my immediate society, it doesn't seem to have negatively affected the majority of my participants. I am surprised to see that almost all of the survey responders responded that they interact with those of a lower/higher social class than them very often. It just didn't seem very likely to me as most of my immediate surroundings are upper and middle class people. I am excited to see what the final responses will show and whether the results will follow the same kind of trends that they have started.

10 Research Plan

For my social class experiment and research, I am going to use a survey that i create using google docs. I would like to ask questions regarding what social class people are in and then ask them questions pertaining to classism. Then, I want to see how the answers correlate to each other.  I'd like to see if classism is active in our immediate society in northern jersey/new york and if it is, how it affects people. I am going to put my survey on facebook. Ideally, I would like to get a wide range of people: people of different ages, genders, and social class. I think that although I am intending to get a wide variety of participants, my results are going to be biased and be mainly from the upper middle class social class, just because of the area I live in. I think that there will definitely be aspects of classism in our society. I think that many people will say that it has both negative and positive affects in their lives. Negative because they are so used to living wealthy lifestyles that they don't know anything else, but positive because usually things in life tend to go their way because they are in a higher social class and their needs and wants are sometimes given preference over a lower class citizen in a classist society.

9 Research Method

For my research, I want to look into the topic of classism.  I want to do an online survey and possibly put it out on Facebook to get responses from all different types of people. I need to figure out what responses to certain questions regarding classism correspond to which social classes those people are in.