Goal-Striving, Social Status, and Mental Disorder: A Research Review

The relationship of psychopathology and such social and psychological factors as social status, social mobility, and mobility orientation is examined. A distinction is made between incidence and prevalence studies, and the research findings reviewed are evaluated accordingly. Although studies on social status and social mobility suggest trends, there are conflicting data. The research on mobility orientation, however, shows that psychopathological groups usually have larger discrepancies between achievement and aspiration than normal control groups. The findings on mobility orientation introduce the possibility of using social-psychological variables to account for (1) correlations between sociological variables and mental illness, and (2) apparently contradictory results.