Social Class and Social Time Perspective

The present research introduces and provisionally tests an improved methodological procedure (the Social Time Perspective Scale) for determining class-linked differences in the way persons anticipate the future and orient their behavior to it. Data for this analysis are drawn from a sample of freshmen in college who come largely, but not entirely, from middle-class backgrounds and from a sample of Job Corpsmen who come primarily from lower-class backgrounds. The findings reveal that: (1) lower-class youth in the Job Corps have a more circumscribed notion of future time than youth from the middle class and their outlook on the future is less systematically ordered; (2) upwardly mobile lower-class youth in college have succeeded in incorporating some features of the middle-class pattern of future orientation in their temporal outlook, but residues of their lower-class backgrounds are still present; and (3) in both the lower- and middle-class samples, the length of temporal perspectives is a factor mediating effective role performance.