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106 Social Inequality Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Social inequality is a pervasive issue that affects individuals and communities across the globe. From economic disparities to racial discrimination, there are countless aspects of society that contribute to unequal opportunities and outcomes for different groups of people. If you are studying or researching social inequality, you may be looking for essay topics that will help you explore this complex and important issue further. To help you get started, here are 106 social inequality essay topic ideas and examples that you can use as inspiration for your next assignment:

• The impact of income inequality on health outcomes
• Gender pay gap: causes and consequences
• Educational inequality and its effects on social mobility
• The role of race in shaping access to opportunities
• Discrimination in the workplace: a case study
• Wealth inequality and its implications for society
• The digital divide: how access to technology perpetuates inequality
• Disability discrimination and social exclusion
• Intersectionality: how multiple forms of inequality intersect
• The role of social class in shaping life chances
• Housing inequality and homelessness
• Environmental justice and marginalized communities
• The criminal justice system and racial disparities
• Healthcare access and disparities in medical treatment
• LGBTQ+ rights and discrimination
• Ageism and discrimination against older adults
• The impact of globalization on income inequality
• Indigenous rights and land sovereignty
• Access to clean water and sanitation in low-income communities
• The role of social policies in reducing inequality
• Religious discrimination and freedom of worship
• Mental health stigma and access to care
• The impact of social media on perceptions of beauty and self-worth
• Immigration policy and its effects on immigrant communities
• The role of language in perpetuating inequality
• The impact of colonialism on modern-day inequality
• Food insecurity and poverty
• The effects of gentrification on low-income communities
• The role of social networks in shaping opportunities
• Disability rights and accessibility in public spaces
• The impact of incarceration on families and communities
• The intersection of race and gender in shaping experiences of inequality
• The role of education in breaking the cycle of poverty
• Affirmative action and its effects on equality
• The impact of political corruption on social inequality
• The role of media in perpetuating stereotypes and prejudice
• The effects of climate change on marginalized communities
• Worker rights and labor exploitation
• The impact of globalization on job opportunities
• The role of social movements in advocating for equality
• The effects of war and conflict on social inequality
• The impact of family structure on economic outcomes
• The role of technology in widening or narrowing the digital divide
• The effects of discrimination on mental health
• The impact of mass incarceration on communities of color
• The role of education in shaping attitudes towards inequality
• The effects of poverty on cognitive development
• The impact of housing segregation on social mobility
• The role of religion in shaping attitudes towards social inequality
• The effects of income inequality on political participation
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures
• The role of social norms in perpetuating gender inequality
• The effects of income inequality on social cohesion
• The impact of war and conflict on refugee communities
• The role of social media in shaping perceptions of poverty
• The effects of discrimination on access to healthcare
• The impact of gentrification on cultural identity
• The role of education in shaping attitudes towards race
• The effects of globalization on cultural diversity
• The impact of incarceration on economic opportunities
• The role of social networks in shaping access to resources
• The effects of climate change on agricultural communities
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous languages
• The role of social norms in shaping attitudes towards disability
• The effects of income inequality on mental health
• The impact of war and conflict on children
• The role of education in shaping attitudes towards immigration
• The effects of discrimination on access to housing
• The impact of gentrification on community cohesion
• The role of religion in shaping attitudes towards poverty
• The effects of income inequality on social trust
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous rights
• The role of social media in shaping perceptions of inequality
• The effects of discrimination on access to education
• The impact of incarceration on family relationships
• The role of social networks in shaping access to employment
• The effects of climate change on coastal communities
• The impact of war and conflict on mental health
• The role of education in shaping attitudes towards gender
• The effects of globalization on cultural identity
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous traditions
• The role of social norms in perpetuating racial inequality
• The effects of income inequality on social capital
• The impact of war and conflict on refugee rights
• The role of education in shaping attitudes towards poverty
• The effects of discrimination on access to transportation
• The impact of globalization on cultural preservation
• The role of social media in shaping perceptions of discrimination
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous identities
• The role of social norms in shaping attitudes towards immigration
• The effects of discrimination on access to legal representation
• The impact of war and conflict on community resilience
• The role of education in shaping attitudes towards disability
• The effects of globalization on cultural exchange
• The impact of colonization on indigenous land rights
• The impact of war and conflict on children's rights
• The effects of discrimination on access to affordable housing
• The impact of gentrification on community development
• The role of religion in shaping attitudes towards social justice
• The effects of income inequality on social mobility
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous health
• The role of social norms in perpetuating gender stereotypes

These are just a few examples of the many ways in which social inequality can manifest in society. By choosing one of these topics (or coming up with one of your own), you can delve deeper into the complexities of this issue and explore how it impacts individuals and communities in different ways. Whether you are writing a research paper, a policy analysis, or a reflective essay, these topics will provide you with a solid foundation for exploring the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to social inequality. Good luck with your writing!

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77 Social Inequality Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on social inequality, ✍️ social inequality essay topics for college, 👍 good social inequality research topics & essay examples, 🎓 most interesting social inequality research titles.

• Effects of Social Inequality: Essay Example
• Social Inequality in Poems, Songs, and Films
• Why It Is Important to Fight Social Inequality
• Social Problem Analysis: Social Inequality in Education
• Education and Social Inequality
• Social Inequality: “The Notebook” by Nick Cassavetes
• Social Inequality, Discrimination, and Solution
• Social Inequality and Global Disparities There are still disparities in the globe based on opportunity, income, sex, age, handicap, sexual orientation, color, class, and ethnicity.
• Social Inequality and Juvenile Delinquency There is a high crime rate among adolescents. At the same time, as it is commonly believed, young people are considered to be the future of the country.
• Social Inequality Depicted in Art Works Understanding social inequality is important since it is the root of major social problems such as unemployment, substance abuse, and criminality.
• Approaches to the Study of Social Inequality The paper states that class inequality inherently implies different opportunities and unequal access to available public and material goods.
• Social Inequality at School The aim of this project is to contribute to the development of tailored solutions for the problems of Canadian school education.
• The Concept of Social Inequality The concept of social inequality is essential for making a global change and improving everyone’s quality of life since it reflects the problems on a societal level.
• Social Institutions Maintaining Inequality Systems The paper investigates the aspects of influence that social institutions have on oppression and privilege as well on access to resources.
• Social Stratification and Inequality Social stratification is a term that describes the social standing system: race, money, power, and education form the social status which differs one group of people from others.
• Social Inequality in the United States Social inequality is a critical aspect in the United States since it is intertwined with economic, cultural, and political issues.
• Social Inequality and Human Rights in the Modern World This paper theorize civil rights to be the basis of developing the main social fields of education, healthcare, and career opportunities.
• Social Inequality: Challenges and Benefits Social inequality can be eliminated by massively investing in public finances to provide free education to everyone.
• Social Inequality and Discrimination in the US The problem of social inequality in the country has continued to widen the gap between the rich and the poor over the years.
• Gender Inequality in Social Inequality This topic was chosen because the problem of gender inequality has existed for a long time and is being solved with varying success.
• Negative Consequences of Social Inequality This paper aims to prove social inequality has always led to negative consequences, analyze the injustice of the superiority of one gender, nation, or social group over another.
• The Problem of Social Inequality at Schools in Canada Social inequality at schools is a issue that undermines the effectiveness of secondary education and leads to long-term and short-term problems of individual and group nature.
• Activism and Social Theory: Inequality The issues of equality became central to the U. S. social, political, and economic agendas. This paper dwells upon the coloniality of power, knowledge, and gender in American society.
• Social Inequality and Stratification in the US One of the factors of social inequality in the US is social stratification. There is a specialization of people that defines more and less valuable types of activities.
• Criminal Behavior, Structural and Social Inequality Forms of structural inequalities that can be seen take the form of community marginalization wherein particular types of races are concentrated in certain communities.
• Social Problem of Inequality Studies of social inequality included non-urban areas and social inequality factors that had not been included in previous studies.
• Evaluating Colonization: Development vs. Exploitation A social inequality exists because of inadequate wealth in certain places which hinders these people from accessing goods, housing, and health care.
• Assessing the Functionalist Explanations of Social Inequality
• Social Inequalities and Exercise During Adulthood
• Combating Social Inequalities Through Education
• Social Inequalities and Ethnic Differences in the United Kingdom
• The Rise and Consequences of Social Inequality in the United States
• Social Inequalities Perpetuated Through Advertisements
• Identifying, Defining, and Measuring Social Inequalities
• Social Inequalities Between Blacks and Mulattoes
• Education and Social Inequalities in the Urban Space
• Social Inequality and Disadvantage of Indigenous People
• Propagation of Social Inequalities by the Media
• Social Inequality During the Industrial Revolution
• China, Globalization, Economic and Social Inequality Issues
• Social Inequality and Health Among Children in the Netherlands: Causes and Consequences
• Regional Social Inequality and Social Deprivation in Guangdong Province, China
• The American Dream: Supporting Social Inequalities
• Social Inequalities: The Individual Significance of a Society’s Issue
• Ecological Thought and Concern for Social Inequalities: Indifference, Opposition or Convergence
• Social Inequalities and International Trade: A Cross-Country Perspective
• Political, Economic, and Social Inequalities That Caused the French Revolution of 1789
• Social Inequalities and Wage, Housing and Pension Reforms in Urban China
• The Effects of Social Inequality on Education
• Social Inequality: Classical and Contemporary Theorists
• A New Approach to Social Inequality: Inequality of Income and Wealth in South Korea
• Poverty and Social Inequality in the Structure of Society
• Social Inequalities in Classical Societies
• The Impact of Climate Risks on Social Inequality
• Social Inequality and Educational Disadvantage
• Potential Links Between Social Inequalities and the Health of the Population
• Social Inequalities: Race, Class, and Gender
• Cultural Diversity and Social Inequality in the US
• Structural Social Inequality Between Men and Women
• Renal Diseases and Social Inequalities in Access to Transplantation in France
• Social Inequalities, Public Policies, and Classifications of Race
• Health and Social Inequalities in Turkey
• Social Inequalities and Failures in College Education
• The Role of Taxes in Correcting the Economic and Social Inequalities on the Base of the Globalization Process
• Social Inequality Rather Than Individual Behavior Choices
• The Correlation Between Lack of Early Childhood Development and Social Inequality
• Social Inequality and Industrialization in the US and Soviet Union
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• Social Inequalities Along the Childhood Cancer Continuum
• Technology Diffusion and Its Effects on Social Inequality
• Social Inequality and Macroeconomic Instability

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These essay examples and topics on Social Inequality were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on June 24, 2024 .

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Social inequalities: theories, concepts and problematics

• Published: 17 May 2021
• Volume 1 , article number  116 , ( 2021 )

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• Renato Miguel Carmo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0052-4387 1  

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This article aims to present a concise perusal of the different approaches developed in the study of social inequalities and in the relationships that they establish with manifold social processes and problems. The text does not intend to be exhaustive from the theoretical point of view, but rather to present an overview of the analytical complexity of the inequalities systems and demonstrate that they should be tackled in a multidimensional, systemic and multiscale perspective.

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By Way of Summary: Substantive Contributions and Public Policies for Dealing with Social Inequalities

Socio-Economic Inequalities: A Statistical Physics Perspective

Data availability.

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

The most recent configuration of the ACM typology is composed of the following class categories: “ Employers and executives are employers or directors at private companies or in the public administration. They may be recruited from any of the groups in the occupational structure. Private Professionals are self-employed and very qualified in certain specialised professions, such as lawyers, architects, and so on. Professionals and managers are employees in upper or mid-level intellectual, scientific and technical jobs. They are different from the previous category essentially because they are not self-employed. Self-employed workers work on their own account without employees in administrative or similar occupations in services and commerce. They include craftsmen and similar workers, farmers and qualified workers in agriculture and fishery. Routine employees are administrative and similar personnel, service employees and salespeople. Industrial workers are manual workers employed in less qualified occupations in construction, industry, transports, agriculture and fishery (Carmo and Nunes 2013 , p. 378).

This section is based on Carmo ( 2014 , pp. 134–138).

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Acknowledgements

This work was developed within the project EmployALL—The employment crisis and the Welfare State in Portugal: deterring drivers of social vulnerability and inequality, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (PTDC/SOC-SOC/30543/2017).

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Carmo, R.M. Social inequalities: theories, concepts and problematics. SN Soc Sci 1 , 116 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00134-5

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Published : 17 May 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00134-5

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Rising inequality: A major issue of our time

Subscribe to global connection, zia qureshi zia qureshi senior fellow - global economy and development.

May 16, 2023

Income and wealth inequality has risen in many countries in recent decades. Rising inequality and related disparities and anxieties have been stoking social discontent and are a major driver of the increased political polarization and populist nationalism that are so evident today. An increasingly unequal society can weaken trust in public institutions and undermine democratic governance. Mounting global disparities can imperil geopolitical stability. Rising inequality has emerged as an important topic of political debate and a major public policy concern.

High and rising inequality

Current inequality levels are high. Contemporary global inequalities are close to the peak levels observed in the early 20th century, at the end of the prewar era (variously described as the Belle Époque or the Gilded Age) that saw sharp increases in global inequality.

Over the past four decades, there has been a broad trend of rising income inequality across countries. Income inequality has risen in most advanced economies and major emerging economies, which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s population and 85 percent of global GDP (Figure 1). The increase has been particularly large in the United States, among advanced economies, and in China, India, and Russia, among major emerging economies.

Figure 1. Inequality has risen in most advanced and major emerging economies Richest 10% income share, 1980-2020

Source: Author, using data from World Inequality Database . Note: Pre-tax national income. Some data points are extrapolated.

Beyond these groups of countries, the trend in the developing world at large has been more mixed, but many countries have seen increases in inequality. In regions such as Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, income inequality levels on average have been relatively more stable, but inequality was already at high levels in these regions—the highest in the world.

Wealth inequality within countries is typically much higher than income inequality. It has followed a rising trend across countries since around 1980, similar to income inequality. Higher wealth inequality feeds higher future income inequality through capital income and inheritance.

The increase in inequality has been especially marked at the top end of the income distribution, with the income share of the top 10 percent (and even more so that of the top 1 percent) rising sharply in many countries. This was so particularly up to the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Those in low- and middle-income groups have suffered a loss of income share, with those in the bottom 50 percent typically experiencing larger losses of income share. These trends in inequality have been associated with an erosion of the middle class and a decline in intergenerational mobility , especially in advanced economies experiencing larger increases in inequality and a greater polarization in income distribution.

While within-country inequality has been rising, inequality between countries (reflecting per capita income differences) has been falling in recent decades. Faster-growing emerging economies, especially the large ones such as China and India, have been narrowing the income gap with advanced economies. Global inequality—the sum of within-country and between-country inequality—has declined somewhat since around 2000, with the fall in between-country inequality more than offsetting the rise in within-country inequality. As within-country inequality has been rising, it now accounts for a much larger part of global inequality (about two-thirds in 2020, up from less than half in 1980). Looking ahead, how within-country inequality evolves will matter even more for global inequality.

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The interplay between the evolution of within-country inequality and between-country inequality, coupled with the differential growth performance of emerging and advanced economies, in recent decades presents an interesting picture of middle-class dynamics at the global level (as depicted by the well-known “ elephant curve ” of the incidence of global economic growth). It shows, for the period since 1980, a rising middle class in the emerging world and a squeezed middle class in rich countries. It also shows an increasing concentration of income at the very top of the income distribution globally.

Drivers of rising inequality

Shifting economic paradigms are altering distributional dynamics. Transformative technological change, led by digital technologies, has been reshaping markets, business models, and the nature of work in ways that can increase inequality within economies. While the specifics differ across countries, this has been happening broadly through three channels: more unequal distribution of labor income with rising wage inequality as technology shifts labor demand from routine low- to middle-level skills to new, higher-level skills; shift of income from labor to capital with increasing automation and a decoupling of wages from firm profitability; and more unequal distribution of capital income with rising market power and economic rents enjoyed by dominant firms in increasingly concentrated and winner-takes-all markets. These dynamics are more evident in advanced economies but could increasingly impact developing economies as the new technologies favoring capital and higher-level skills make deeper inroads there.

Globalization (international trade, offshoring) also has contributed to rising inequality within economies, especially in advanced economies by negatively affecting wages and jobs of lower-skilled workers in tradable sectors. These sectors increasingly extend beyond manufacturing as digital globalization expands the range of activities, including services, deliverable across borders.

In emerging economies, technology is reshaping how international trade affects national inequality. The new technologies, born in advanced economies, are shifting manufacturing and global value chains toward higher capital and skill intensity. Leading manufacturing firms located in emerging economies and engaged in exporting are adopting these technologies in order to be able to compete, diminishing employment generation and wage growth prospects for less-skilled workers from this higher-productivity segment of industry in economies whose factor endowments would warrant less capital- and skill-intensive technologies—and thus limiting the potential of international trade to reduce inequality within these economies by boosting demand for their more abundant factor endowment (less-skilled workers). Meanwhile, smaller firms that absorb most such workers in these economies remain engaged in low-productivity activities, many in the informal economy and in petty service sectors.

Globalization has been a force in recent decades for reducing inequality between economies by expanding export opportunities for emerging economies and spurring their economic growth. But globalization’s role in promoting international economic convergence faces new challenges as technological change alters production processes and trade patterns (more on this below).

Other broad trends in recent decades affecting the distribution of income and wealth include changes in institutional settings such as economic deregulation, increasing financialization of economies coupled with a high concentration of financial income and wealth, and erosion of labor market institutions such as minimum wage laws and collective bargaining. Moreover, the redistributive role of the state has been weakening with declining tax progressivity and with transfer programs facing the pressure of tighter fiscal constraints.

Role of public policy

Large and persistent increases in inequality within economies are not an inevitable consequence of forces such as technological change and globalization. Much depends on how public policy responds to the new dynamics that these forces generate. In the midst of these common forces of change, the rise in inequality has been uneven across countries. The difference lies largely in countries’ institutional and policy settings and how they have responded. In general, looking across countries, public policy has been behind the curve. It has been slow to rise to the new challenges to promote more inclusive outcomes from economic change.

Public policy to reduce inequality is often viewed narrowly in terms of redistribution―taxes and transfers. This is indeed an important element, especially in view of the erosion of the state’s redistributive role in recent decades. But there is a much broader policy agenda of “predistribution” that can make the growth process itself more inclusive and produce better market outcomes—by promoting wider access to new opportunities for firms and workers and enhancing their capabilities to adjust as market dynamics shift.

This latter agenda of reforms spans competition policy and regulatory frameworks to keep markets competitive and inclusive in the digital age; innovation ecosystems and technology policies to put innovation to work for broader groups of people; digital infrastructure and literacy to reduce the digital divide; education and (re)training programs to upskill and reskill workers while addressing inequalities in access to these programs; and labor market policies and social protection systems to enable workers to obtain a fair share of economic returns and to support them in times of transition. In many of these reform areas, the new dynamics that economies are facing call for fresh thinking and significant policy overhaul.

Outlook for inequality

Absent more responsive policies to combat inequality, the current high levels of inequality are likely to persist or even rise further. Artificial intelligence and related new waves of digital technologies and automation could increase inequality further within countries. Even as new technologies increase productivity and produce greater economic affluence, and new jobs and tasks emerge to replace those displaced and so prevent large technological unemployment, inequality could reach much higher levels. The economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced some of the inequality-increasing dynamics. Also, a high and increasing concentration of wealth can exacerbate income inequality in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

Technological change also poses new challenges to global economic convergence that has reduced inequality between countries in the past couple of decades. Faster growth in emerging economies led by export of manufactures has depended greatly on their comparative advantage in labor-intensive manufacturing based on large populations of low-skill, low-wage workers. This source of comparative advantage increasingly will erode as automation of low-skill work expands. Emerging economies face the challenge of recalibrating their growth models as technology disrupts traditional pathways to growth and development.

Emerging economies’ growth prospects also face other headwinds, including the scarring effects of the pandemic and global supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and an unsettled global geopolitical environment, which would hit the more trade-dependent economies harder. If growth in emerging economies falters, the decline in between-country inequality will slow, which could stall or even reverse the modest decline in global inequality observed since about 2000 if within-country inequality continues to mount.

Climate change is another factor that could worsen inequality within and between countries. Low-income groups and countries are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and have less capacity to cope with them.

Income and wealth inequality is elevated. In the absence of policies to counter recent trends, inequality could rise to still higher levels. High and rising inequality entails adverse economic, social, and political consequences. Policymakers must pay more attention to the changing distributional dynamics in the digital age and harness the forces of change for more inclusive prosperity. History tells us that large and unabated rises in inequality can end up badly.

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What Is Social Inequality and Why Does it Matter? Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

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Social Inequality - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Social inequality refers to the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and privileges among individuals or groups within a society. Essays can explore the various forms of social inequality such as income inequality, gender inequality, racial inequality, and their underlying causes. Moreover, discussions could extend to the implications of social inequality on societal cohesion, economic development, and the strategies aimed at mitigating inequality. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Social Inequality you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Hand to Mouth: an Analysis of Poverty Social Inequality  

In Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, Tirado undergoes poverty on multiple counts and elaborates on her experiences from living in poverty. Throughout the book, Tirado speaks from a first-person perspective and thoroughly explains how living in poverty negatively impacts her personal and professional life. For example, she illustrates in great detail what it’s like to raise kids, work several jobs, put food on the table, and pay for a roof over her head while struggling in […]

Social Inequality: then V.s Now

Social inequality, by definition, occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly is a problem that is has been in this world for thousands of years. The first signs of social inequality originated in the Paleolithic era, which occurred 40,000 thousand years ago. Social inequality can be seen as negative due to it causing a separation between a group of people. The idea of social inequality is discussed in multiple ways. Examples include the poem “Social Classes” by […]

Racial Inequality in America

The United States has been struggling with racial inequality for decades, and the media has been paying more attention to this issue. Race can impact the likelihood of graduating high school, attending college, or even maintaining a livable income as an adult (Back and Solomos, 2020). An individual's racial ethnicity is a factor when determining these outcomes and is worth noting. If you are skeptical of your race's role in the number of options you have, look no further than […]

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Is Racism Still a Current Issue in America

Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. It is no secret that America has a racist past, with issues like hate crimes, police brutality, and slavery. However, the concern of racism is still apparent in American society today. Completely eliminating racism will be very hard. However, to start the process of eliminating this issue, we need to start by recognizing our own […]

Racial Discrimination Within the Workplace

Racial Discrimination Within the Workplace Racial discrimination has played a big part in the United States history without a doubt however, there is still an argument on whether or not racial discrimination still exist in the U.S. in particular the workplace. According to Pew Research Center, over 150 million American are employed and of those 150 million 12.6% of employees are African American but many still say that they have experienced racism within the workplace. Racial discrimination is not only […]

Society and Racial Discrimination

Racial Discrimination Our society has turned into a hatred and politics place throughout the years. Racial discrimination is into what America has grown up on. This issue has always existed because of fundamental part of America's history. From the KKK's aggressive campaign against immigrants, to the police violence against black people, racism and discrimination continue to be a big controversial problem. People need to take the responsibility of this culture to address racism and learn how to accept and embrace […]

Institutional Racism and Police Brutality in Education System

In today society there are several police brutality against black people, and in some institutional systems black people still experience racism from people who thinks they are superior. Racism is an issue which emerged from history till now and it has become a major problem in our society. This has affected some families to live their dreams and influences other people mindset towards each other. Institutional Racism is expressed in social and political institution which is governed by the behavioral […]

A Simple Introduction to Three Main Types of Racism

Race plays an important role in both personal and social life, and racial issues are some of the most heated debates in the world due to their complexity, involving the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups. Consciously or unconsciously, when one race holds prejudice, discrimination, and a sense of superiority to oppress another race, the issue of racism arises. Based on aspects of individual biases, social institutions, and cultural backgrounds, the three most common types of racism […]

Closing the Education Gap by Attacking Poverty Among Children

Looking around the campus of an Ivy League schools, one wonders how students from such diverse backgrounds ultimately wound up at the same place. From having a mother who works in admissions, I grew up hearing that no matter where you came from, your socioeconomic status, and even sometimes your grades, all kids have the potential to attend a prestigious university. However, I find that hard to believe. With a combination of taking this class on homelessness this semester, growing […]

Anti LGBT Discrimination

Anti LGBT Discrimination The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population has long fought for their right to equal treatment with some progress made. As society's values change and adjust to become more accepting of this marginalized community, the more our policies and lawmakers include them. Anti-LGBT policy is at risk. Under the Trump administration, the federal civil rights law, Title IX, that bans sex discrimination, would enact that sex only include female, or male orientation and is strictly determined […]

Development of Discrimination in Workplace

Discrimination happens everyday in the world. Many people face discrimination at work, school, driving, or normal everyday activities. Some examples include different treatment based on race, gender, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity by employers. The major type of discrimination that is sweeping the nation is racial discrimination. The toss up of racial discrimination may seem so crazy to people. Unfortunately, there are many people who are dealing with this problem across America. […]

Racism Around the World

Racism has existed for a long time, but during the last two centuries, hate towards racial minorities and majorities has changed. Racism happens every day throughout the world, anyone can be a victim of it and it will always exist. In the movie The Revenant, racism appeared to be clear when Fitzgerald expressed his hate to Glass, because Glass's wife and son were native Indians. There are three types of racism; scientific racism, cultural racism, and institutional racism (Morehouse). Scientific […]

A Problem of Social Justice in World

Multiple people are discriminated for their race, their religion, or their sexuality. The idea of entitlement has been an issue in the United States for centuries. Even before the United States became a country in 1776, racial prejudice existed. At first it was the Native Americans' who were looked down on and forced to do the new white settlers dirty work. Then it became African Americans. Whites have been seen to be superior to African Americans for many years, more […]

Economic Inequality and Governmental Responsibility

Ever since the emergence of civilization several hundreds of years ago, social inequality has been a prevalent aspect of many societies across the world. This social structure developed as a result of several factors, amongst them political and economic status in the society. During the early stages of civilization, social and political status was closely related whereby the few powerful political leaders tended to be wealthier than the lesser politically influential majority. Although this dynamic is still prevalent in developing […]

Martin Luther King and the Fight against Racism in the US

Racism is one of the social problems that have continued from the past centuries to the present. Even though the question of racism has changed throughout history, it always succeeds in finding a place in the daily hustle of human life. Racist and separatist policies take root and become traditional in society. If we say that idea about inequality in other words, racism is not at the core of society, it is learned later by individuals who make up society […]

Racial Discrimination in Modern World

Racial discrimination occurs when an individual is treated less favorably than someone else in a similar situation due to their race, color, descent, national or ethnic origin, or immigrant status. Members of racial and ethnic minorities continue to fight for equal access and opportunity, especially during times of stringent economic conditions. Often, the targeted race faces more difficulties, such as acquiring a well-paid job or housing. Racial prejudice and stereotypes continue to negatively impact job opportunities in this country. Prejudice […]

A Reflective Summary on Racism and the Socio-Economic Effects of Segregation in America

Slavery is rightfully considered by many to be America’s original sin. This paper examines the deleterious effect of systemic racism on its victims and on race relations. My reflection will be anchored primarily by W.E. Du Bois’ acclaimed publication The Souls of Black Folk, with additional support from other historical and contemporary sources. All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (U.S. Declaration […]

The Institutional Racism

In today society there is several police brutality against black people, and it is governed by the behavioral norms which defined the social and political institution that support institutional systems. Black people still experience racism from people who think they are superior, it is a major problem in our society which emerged from history till date and it has influences other people mindset towards each other to live their dreams. In the educational system, staffs face several challenges among black […]

An Issue of Racial Discrimination in America

America has always been known to be the best continent from the entire world. As a requirement, a world greatest country in the world is expected to have equality in every way possible. However, inequality still exists today, deeply rooted in most prejudiced societies causing minorities pain. My paper address one of the most common social problems that affect many societies in the United States, which is racial discrimination. Racial discrimination is the action or behavior that results in unequal […]

Work Discrimination against Women

In today's society, there are a lot of gender-linked social issues that affect people in a countless amount of ways. A gender-linked problem I women would like to touch on is work discrimination against women in the work place.  Studies have shown that 42 percent of working women in the United This gender-linked problem draws me to the question, how does work discrimination affect women in the United States? The first way women face workplace discrimination is through the hiring […]

Racist and Ethnic Discrimination

Abstract I have chosen these two author it gave me the different opinion how they describe about racial and ethnic discrimination. The first author (Barkan) opinion that he will describe about racial and ethnic discrimination go back history for instinct Civil War and through Christopher Columbus. The next author (McConahaybetty), his opinion is different than Barkan. He states that white do not discriminate against African American and treat them equality. He also states about different color marriage that it should […]

What is Racism: a Definition and Examples

What is racism? Racism is discrimination and/or being prejudice against another race. My paper is going to inform you on events on racism that have affected us humans throughout history. There has been so many events based on racism that are still on going to this day. I will give you my personal thoughts on how I feel about racism. Racism and prejudice has been around for centuries and is still very popular today. My topic is mainly focused on […]

Unconscious Racism and how it Affects People of Color

I want to concentrate primarily on racial microaggressions in the classroom and how teachers believe that their intentions, remarks, or actions are not deemed as racist. Racism is an exceedingly controversial issue here in America. It dates to as early as the Colonial Period when blacks were used for slavery. Sadly, racism is still very prevalent in society today; however, it is not always presented in the forms many are used to. You don't have to use the n-word and […]

Discrimination of Races

Discrimination of races is something that is occuring in our society everyday. It still exists today because it started so long ago and once certain races had the hierarchy, some refuse to let go of the idea that they have more power just because they look a certain way and they choose to discriminate the minorities. Discrimination against a person's race occurs when an individual or group of individuals are treated unequally because of their true or perceived race. I […]

A Major Reproducer of Social Inequalities Due to Law Enforcement and the Judicial Court System

Abstract: This paper focuses on the social inequalities produced by the criminal justice system and how that contributes to the disproportionate distribution of punishment in the United States. The institution that is a key reproducer of social inequalities in the U.S. is the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system is significant and plays a major role in upholding social control by imposing penalties on those who have been arrested, convicted, prosecuted, or sentenced for committing criminal offenses (National Center […]

Educational Disparities Among Black and Hispanics

Introduction Educational disparities based on race have been evident in the United States for a long time. They exist in many forms example Hispanics and Blacks commonly score low grades and perform poorly on the standardized exams, their number of enrollment in public colleges is smaller than the whites, their drop out level is also high. Study has shown that they get low grades compared to other races Asians included. In the last 45 years in the United States, there […]

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What is culture? Provide an example of Australian norms that illustrates your answer. Culture is the social heritage of an organized group or community, the shared behavior patterns, subjective constructs and productive relationships that are learned through the course of socialization. These shared norms recognize members of a particular cultural group as unique setting it apart from other teams. The intangible aspect of societies such as values and interpretation of symbols form the primary elements that define culture. People from […]

Problem of Discrimination in Plain Sight

Race relations has arguably been the most divisive and hotly contested issue in contemporary American politics and throughout United States history. A solution to this issue in the past was to "level the playing field" through programs now colloquially named affirmative action. Many people feel that these programs are necessary to either counteract injustices or ensure the advancement of certain minorities. However, there is evidence to show that affirmative action has become a form of discrimination in and of itself […]

The Poverty Among Us

In our current society, poverty is an issue that plagues third world nations. All countries are interwoven with one another because of everyone needing each other for certain resources. When one country is in need, it interrupts a process that all countries have with one another. Poverty is an issue that everyone should pay attention to even if it does not occur where we live or does not affect us directly as much as it does other nations. Not only […]

Racism and Shootings

With the massacre in Parkland, Florida and the recent shooting in Indiana, there has been more emphasis on the topic of school shootings in the past year. In response to this issue, Donald Trump has suggested the idea of arming teachers as the preventative action. Even though many may see this as a way to protect students, guns in the hands of teachers could bring potential risk to students of color who fear for their safety. When the concept of […]

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A Research Agenda for Understanding How Social Inequality is Linked to Brain Structure and Function

Mark l. hatzenbuehler.

1 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138

Katie A. McLaughlin

David g. weissman, mina cikara.

Consistent evidence documents powerful effects of social inequality on health, well-being, and academic achievement. Yet research on whether social inequality may also be linked to brain structure and function has, until recently, been rare. Here, we describe three methodological approaches—including single-site, single study; multi-site, single study; and spatial meta-analysis—that can be used to study this question. We review empirical work that, using these approaches, has observed associations between structural measures of social inequality—including structural stigma, community-level prejudice, gender inequality, neighborhood disadvantage, and the generosity of the social safety net for low-income families—and neural outcomes. We evaluate the relative strengths and limitations of these methods, discuss ethical considerations, and outline directions for future research. In doing so, we advocate for a paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience that explicitly incorporates upstream structural and contextual factors, which we argue holds promise for uncovering the neural correlates of social inequality.

Extensive evidence from numerous disciplines, including sociology, psychology, economics, and public health, demonstrates that various forms of social inequality may exert a powerful influence on human health and wellbeing. This work has examined the role of income inequality, 1 racial residential segregation, 2 , 3 exposure to neighborhood violence, 4 , 5 community-level prejudice, 6 – 12 structural racism, 13 and institutional policies that restrict the rights of immigrants 14 – 16 and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) 17 – 24 people. The link between such factors and outcomes as diverse as longevity, 25 , 26 educational achievement, 27 mental health problems, 28 and physical disease prevalence 29 , 30 is well documented. Yet despite the weight of evidence that social inequalities are key risk factors for so many outcomes, there has been much less research on how inequalities may be linked to the structure and function of the human brain.

We believe that one of the main barriers to the study of social impacts on neural outcomes is the fact that most neuroimaging studies are conducted in a single community. In such designs, respondents are ubiquitously exposed to the same macro-social context, 31 which precludes the possibility of studying the effects of differences in social context. In this Perspective, we draw on advances in population neuroscience 32 , 33 to present a call to action to the field of cognitive neuroscience to systematically examine associations between social inequalities and neural outcomes, as well as potential causal mechanisms. We first describe how social inequality is operationalized and make the case for why studying social inequalities matters for cognitive neuroscience. We then describe three methodological approaches that can be used to explore associations between social inequalities and neural outcomes. Finally, we highlight recent evidence that has begun to leverage these methods to identify the associations of social inequality with brain structure and function. In doing so, we advocate for a paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience that explicitly incorporates upstream contextual factors, which we argue holds promise for uncovering the neural correlates of social inequality.

Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Social Inequality

Social inequalities have been defined in various ways across disciplines but generally refer to “the unequal distribution of, and unequal access to, highly valued and desired material and nonmaterial social goods. Social inequalities imply systematic advantages and disadvantages in life chances, living conditions, opportunity structures, and life outcomes of individuals and social groups.” 34 As suggested by this conceptualization, scholars have examined different dimensions and forms of social inequality—including economic inequality, health inequality, and inequality related to social position (e.g., based on gender, race, sexuality). Depending on the research question, a dimension of social inequality can reflect either an outcome (e.g., studies examining causes of gender inequality) or a mechanism (e.g., studies examining whether economic inequality causes differences in health status between white and Black Americans).

Social inequality is measured in a variety of ways. To illustrate these differing approaches to operationalization, we draw on illustrative examples from research on two sources/forms of social inequality—stigma and socioeconomic status (SES). Stigma is a social factor that has been conceptualized as existing at individual, interpersonal, and structural levels. 35 , 36 Stigma has been measured: 1) at the individual level, in the form of perceptions and reactions, such as stereotype embodiment 37 or identity concealment; 38 2) at the interpersonal level, as differential treatment resulting from one’s social position, such as having a criminal record; 39 and 3) at the structural level, in the form of social policies that restrict opportunities, resources, and wellbeing, such as state laws denying services to same-sex couples. 21 The literature on SES, which can similarly been measured across individual, group, and structural levels, offers another instructive example. SES has been variously measured: 1) at the individual level—as personal income, occupation, educational attainment, or perceptions of one’s subjective social status; 2) at the group level, via household family income or the highest educational level achieved by an adult in the household; and 3) at the structural level, as the median income level of one’s neighborhood, an area-level measure of deprivation, or level of income inequality across countries. 40 – 42 Of course, these three levels are not independent, but rather are mutually constitutive. That is, structural forms of stigma not only shape how individuals perceive and react to stigma 43 but also influence how the stigmatized are treated in interpersonal contexts (e.g., employment). 44 Similarly, individuals with lower income reside in neighborhoods with greater material deprivation, which in turn shapes individual income through institutional policies and practices, as in the case of racial covenants that restrict Black Americans from purchasing homes in neighborhoods with more economic resources. 2

As is evident from these examples, structural measures of social inequalities are those that reflect properties of a particular spatial location at a particular moment in time that are either aggregated across the group of people who inhabit that location (e.g., median household income) or that exist only at a level of aggregation above individuals (e.g., city, county, state, or country-level policies). Consequently, the measurement approaches that are necessary to operationalize these structural constructs differ from those approaches that are used to capture the individual-level experiences (e.g., income or educational attainment) more traditionally explored in the cognitive neuroscience literature ( Table 1 ). Thus, in our paper, we only review articles that have used the kinds of structural measures of social inequality as reflected in Table 1 .

Measurement Approaches for Studying Associations between Social Inequalities and Neural Structure/Function: Examples from the Literatures on Stigma and Prejudice

Why Studying Social Inequalities Matters for Cognitive Neuroscience

Although the importance of studying whether broad macro-social factors are related to brain development has repeatedly been articulated, 33 , 45 – 47 studies have only recently begun to examine associations of social inequality with brain structure and function. This work has shown, for example, that greater neighborhood-level disadvantage in early childhood is associated with elevated amygdala response to neutral faces in early adulthood, 48 that exposure to state-level structural stigma is associated with smaller hippocampal volume among Black and Latinx youth, 49 and that the magnitude of the association between SES and brain volume varies significantly across European countries. 50

We argue that further systematic investigation into associations between social inequalities and neural outcomes will advance research in cognitive neuroscience in several substantive ways. First, cognitive neuroscience has the potential to reveal the neural mechanisms through which social inequality relates to behavior and school achievement as well as health disparities, 51 , 52 particularly mediating processes that may be difficult to detect via self-report. 53 By linking macro-level factors related to social inequality with micro-level neural processes, such findings would complement research on other mechanisms underlying the negative effects of social inequality—such as health behaviors, 54 access to medical care, 55 and disinvestment of economic resources. 2

Second, cognitive neuroscience has provided essential insights into how social factors—such as social rejection, 56 exposure to interpersonal violence, 57 intergroup prejudice, 58 childhood maltreatment, 59 and low SES 60 , 61 —relate to brain structure and function. To date, however, this work has focused almost exclusively on social factors measured at the level of individual/interpersonal experiences and/or perceptions. Expanding the level of analysis to broader structural factors may shed light onto previously unexamined correlates of neural structure and function.

Third, integrating greater focus on structural factors in neuroimaging research can contribute to efforts to improve reproducibility in cognitive neuroscience by revealing meaningful explanations for replication failures. 62 – 64 For example, the association of SES with brain volume and cognitive ability varies significantly across European countries, 50 with the association being weak in some countries and pronounced in others. Thus, depending on where the neuroimaging study is conducted, researchers may come to different conclusions about the significance and magnitude of observed associations. Rather than a failure to replicate, this may instead reflect the fact that social context is a meaningful moderator of associations frequently examined in cognitive neuroscience studies. Although the role of contextual sensitivity has been highlighted in discussions of scientific reproducibility, 65 few studies have provided empirical evidence for it, particularly in cognitive neuroscience.

Finally, understanding whether social inequalities are associated with brain structure and function has not only scientific but also societal implications. Debate about the impact of decades of growing income inequality, persistent systemic racism, and policies that restrict the rights of large swaths of the population (e.g., on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or immigration status) is at the forefront of public discourse. Research into the neural correlates of social inequality may inform these debates as well as litigation efforts to address inequality, similar to the role that such evidence has played in other legal domains, including the treatment of minors in the criminal justice system. 66

We develop our arguments, first, by reviewing three methodological approaches that can be used to examine the relationship between social inequalities and neural outcomes. After reviewing these three methods, we discuss their relative strengths and limitations (summarized in Table 2 ) and suggest areas for future inquiry that are necessary to advance this work.

Advantages and Limitations of Different Methodological Approaches for Studying Associations between Social Inequalities and Neural Structure/Function

Methodological Approach #1: Single Site, Single Study

The most straightforward and frequently employed approach to examining associations between social inequalities and neural outcomes is the single-site, single-study approach. In these studies, structural measures of social inequality are typically assessed at the neighborhood level, because this is the only contextual unit of analysis with variability within a single site (i.e., a metropolitan area and/or its surrounding regions). Most commonly, these studies measure neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage, 48 , 67 – 71 frequently operationalized via composite scales, such as the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), which includes area-level factors such as income, education, housing quality, and employment. As with all measures, the ADI has strengths and limitations, including a potential over-emphasis on home values in some regions. 72 We refer readers to an excellent scoping review of different area-based socioeconomic deprivation indices 73 to guide their selection of the appropriate measurement approach.

In an example of this approach, Gard and colleagues 48 examined the association of neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage—operationalized with a composite measure (e.g., percent families below the poverty line, percent households on public assistance) 74 , 75 —with neural responses to ambiguous (i.e., neutral) faces among participants sampled from the Pittsburgh area. Greater neighborhood disadvantage in early childhood was associated with elevated amygdala response to neutral faces in early adulthood, after adjusting for family-level SES and other forms of adversity including maternal depression and harsh parenting ( Figure 1 ). 48 These results suggest that neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with neural response to ambiguous social cues over and above individual and family-level factors known to be associated with these responses.

Figure adapted from Gard et al. (2021). 48 Greater neighborhood disadvantage in early childhood was associated with elevated amygdala response to neutral faces in early adulthood, after adjusting for family-level SES and other forms of adversity including maternal depression and harsh parenting. These findings were replicated in 2 studies of boys from low-income family backgrounds, (a) at the University of Pittsburgh with participants from Pittsburgh ( n =167) and (b) at the University of Michigan with participants from Chicago, Toledo, and Detroit.

Strengths and limitations.

The primary advantage of the single-site, single-study approach is pragmatic—it is easier to obtain neuroimaging data on samples living within a smaller geographic region (i.e., neighborhoods) and on a single scanner. But this advantage also represents the principal limitation of this approach: it is constrained in its ability to examine social inequalities beyond neighborhood-level characteristics. This is an important limitation, given that social inequalities are often generated by norms, attitudes, and institutional policies and practices that occur at broader geographic scales, including counties, states, and countries. Researchers interested in evaluating these broader sources of social inequalities must use one of the two other methods, to which we now turn.

Methodological Approach #2: Multi-Site, Single Study

The second methodological approach involves a single study that includes multiple data collection sites that have harmonized the collection of neuroimaging data. By including multiple sites that provide variation in social inequalities across different geographic scales (e.g., states, countries), this approach overcomes one of the key limitations of the single-site, single-study design. While multi-site studies have examined sources of social inequality across smaller geographic scales like neighborhoods—including racial residential segregation 76 and socioeconomic disadvantage 77 —we focus in this section on studies that have investigated social inequality at broader units of analysis.

Two recent studies leveraged the contextual variability from a multi-site study—the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which was conducted at 21 sites across the United States—to examine whether social inequalities, measured at the state level, were associated with neural outcomes among youth. In one study, Hatzenbuehler and colleagues 49 operationalized the level of structural stigma related to gender, race, and ethnicity in each state, which was measured separately for each stigmatized group using state-level indicators of social policies (e.g., whether immigrants were granted access to health services) and aggregated prejudicial attitudes (e.g., endorsement of racial stereotypes). Black youth residing in environments characterized by higher structural racism had smaller hippocampal volume than Black youth residing in environments with lower levels of structural racism, controlling for demographics and family SES; the same pattern was observed for Latinx youth residing in contexts involving high structural stigma related to Latinx ethnicity compared to Latinx youth in low-stigma contexts. Further, perceived discrimination was unrelated to hippocampal volume among Black and Latinx youth, suggesting that an objective measure of stigma at the contextual level (i.e., structural stigma) may be more strongly associated with neurodevelopment than subjective perceptions of stigma measured at the individual level. 49

In another study, Weissman and colleagues 78 examined whether cost of living and the generosity of the social safety net for low-income families moderated the well-replicated association between family income and hippocampal volume in children 61 , 75 , 79 , 80 across 21 sites in the ABCD study. Three policies aimed at providing support for low-income families that vary meaningfully across states were examined: the amount of monthly benefits provided by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (i.e., welfare: a federal program but operates through state block grants; the generosity of the benefit therefore varies between U.S. states); the amount of the state-level earned income tax credit; and whether the state enacted the expansion of Medicaid benefits made available by the Affordable Care Act, which expanded access to free health insurance through Medicaid to all U.S. citizens with income up to 138% of the federal poverty line, although not all states adopted these expanded benefits. The association between family income and hippocampal volume varied significantly across states, such that the association was stronger in states with higher cost of living. Critically, however, the magnitude of this association also varied as a function of the generosity of state-level policies designed to help low-income families. Among high cost of living states, more generous cash benefits for lower-SES families reduced the association between SES and hippocampal volume by 34% ( Figure 2 ).

Figure adapted from Weissman et al. (2023). 78 3-way interactions between state-level cost of living and generosity of anti-poverty programs and individual family income-to-needs ratio (log-transformed). Cash assistance was based on both monthly Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits in that state and the average monthly Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in that state. Higher cost of living was associated with smaller hippocampal volume among low-income participants, but this was attenuated when states also offered more generous cash benefits. Postal abbreviations for the 17 states in the ABCD study (CA: California; CO: Colorado; CT: Connecticut; FL: Florida; MD: Maryland: MI: Michigan; MN: Minnesota; MO: Missouri; NY: New York; OK: Oklahoma; OR: Oregon; PA: Pennsylvania; SC: South Carolina; UT: Utah; VT: Vermont; VA: Virginia; WI: Wisconsin) are placed along the X-axis in the location corresponding most closely to their cost of living and cash assistance relative to the other states. Hippocampal volume estimates are equivalent to the random intercept of the relation between income and hippocampal volume for that state when family income is 1 SD above (high income) or below (low income) the mean.

The primary advantage of the multi-site, single-study approach is that it provides variation in exposure to broad social contexts, such as states and countries, that vary on the dimension of interest related to social inequality. In Table 3 , we provide details of several multi-site neuroimaging studies that have sufficient variability in social contexts beyond the neighborhood level to examine associations between social inequality and neural outcomes. We also refer interested readers to the Linked External Data source provided by the ABCD study, which includes residential, census, and state-level variables that provide new opportunities for examining how social inequalities relate to neural outcomes. 81

Examples of Multi-Site Neuroimaging Studies

One limitation of this approach is that some multi-site studies do not provide information about the site where each participant was scanned, precluding the ability to link the dataset to structural measures of social inequality. An additional limitation is that the resources needed to conduct and coordinate large team-based efforts are often prohibitive, which means that researchers must almost always rely on existing multi-site studies, like the ABCD study, where the data have already been collected. Consequently, researchers are constrained by the measures and tasks that were previously collected, which may not always align with the research question and may not include the measures that are needed to improve inferences (e.g., key confounders, plausible alternative explanations, candidate mechanisms). Given these challenges, researchers may need to consider alternative approaches to study whether social inequalities are related to neural outcomes, such as the one we consider next.

Methodological Approach #3: Multi-Site, Multi-Study

Despite the important insights that the methodological approaches reviewed above have produced, they are limited in that single-site studies can only examine variation across neighborhoods, and multi-site studies require massive funding investments and coordination across institutions and researchers. As such, a third approach—a multi-site, multi-study approach known as spatial meta-analysis —circumvents the challenges associated with single- and multi-site single-study designs. This approach retains many aspects of a traditional meta-analysis, with the added step that studies are geo-located, allowing researchers to characterize each included study in terms of the social context in which it was conducted. 82 Spatial meta-analyses therefore leverage the contextual variability that naturally exists across neuroimaging studies to examine associations between contextual variables and neural outcomes. This approach allows researchers to utilize data that are already published and generate new insights by linking those results to structural measures of inequality after the fact.

Although meta-analyses of fMRI data are commonplace in cognitive neuroscience, only two recent studies, to our knowledge, have used spatial meta-analyses to examine contextual variation across studies. The first re-analyzed a comprehensive set of studies examining white participants’ neural responses to Black (vs. white) faces within the U.S. to determine whether community-level racial prejudice was associated with the degree of neural activation to Black (vs. white) faces in primarily white participants. 83 A substantial body of work in social neuroscience has examined the neural underpinnings of racial prejudice. 58 Initial work on this topic centered on the role of threat-related responses in the amygdala to out-group members as a potential neural mechanism underlying racial prejudice. 58 Despite decades of research, however, evidence for a stronger amygdala response to racial out-group compared to in-group members has been mixed. 58 Hatzenbuehler and colleagues 83 examined whether these inconsistencies may be due, in part, to contextual factors typically ignored in cognitive neuroscience, such that observed associations are more (or less) pronounced depending on the structural context in which participants are embedded—specifically, to the varying levels of racial prejudice in these communities. Racial attitudes, obtained from over 10,000 respondents from Project Implicit, were aggregated to the 17 counties in which each study was conducted. Multi-level kernel density analysis demonstrated that significant differences in neural activation to Black (vs. white) faces in two key nodes of the salience network (right amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex [dACC]) were detected more often in communities with higher (vs. lower) levels of explicit racial prejudice. Sensitivity analyses revealed that this pattern of activation was unrelated to three alternative variables that may serve as common causes or consequences of racial prejudice (i.e., income inequality, community-level racial composition, and community-level education), providing further evidence for specificity of the results to community-level racial prejudice. 83

Whereas this spatial meta-analysis measured structural sources of inequality (i.e., area-level prejudice) at the local level (U.S. counties), a second spatial meta-analysis assessed gender inequality at the level of 29 countries, using nation-level data derived from two widely utilized indicators of gender inequality. 84 , 85 The authors then examined associations of gender inequality with sex differences in cortical thickness and surface area in adult men and women. The study found thinner cortices among women (vs. men) in countries with greater gender inequality—especially in regions involved in salience processing (i.e., right caudal anterior cingulate and right medial orbitofrontal) and in left lateral occipital cortex ( Figure 3 ). 86 In contrast, there were no sex differences in these regions between men and women in countries with less gender inequality. Analyses remained robust after controlling for other country-level economic characteristics (i.e., per capita gross domestic product).

Figure adapted from Zugman et al. (2023). 86 (a) The authors identified 139 studies conducted in 29 countries. (b) Using nation-level data from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, the authors examined the association between gender inequality and sex differences in cortical thickness and surface area. They found that in studies conducted in countries with greater gender inequality, men tended to have greater right hemisphere cortical thickness. Associations between gender inequality and sex differences in cortical thickness in specific regions were also observed.

Collectively, these two sets of findings confirm the feasibility of using spatial meta-analysis to link structural measures of social inequality to neural outcomes, highlight the novel insights it can generate regarding how social inequality relates to brain structure and function, and underscore the utility of this method for reconciling conflicting results in the cognitive neuroscience literature.

Spatial meta-analysis capitalizes on the substantial heterogeneity in exposure to various forms of social inequality that occur across individual neuroimaging studies. This represents its greatest advantage: the ability to leverage geographic and temporal variation in existing neuroimaging studies to examine relationships between social inequalities and neural outcomes.

At the same time, this approach has limitations. One has to do with data constraints in terms of where studies are conducted, as the social contexts have already been selected based on where the individual studies happened to be conducted. This may not be an issue if these studies are spatially distributed; however, if studies are conducted in a few communities, this could introduce issues related to spatial clustering (e.g., geospatial autocorrelation) or to restricted ranges in the measures of social inequality. A second set of limitations concerns the ability to synthesize fMRI data across multiple labs. These issues include differences in pre-processing, thresholding of whole-brain effects, reporting of parameter estimates, and regions of interest used to extract effects. That said, researchers have developed analytic techniques to overcome these challenges, including in meta-analyses, with notable successes in identifying, for example, the brain bases of emotion and memory. 87 – 93 A third limitation involves the availability of data on the location of the individual studies. Often, this information is not provided, is inexact, or must be inferred based on the institution of the first or senior author. This limitation means that it is often necessary to contact individual researchers to request specific details on study location. One recommendation of our analysis, which others have also called for, 82 is to require this type of geographic information to be more systematically reported in reports of neuroimaging studies.

Considerations for Research Linking Social Inequality and Neural Outcomes

In this section, we offer several strategies and considerations to guide programmatic research on the links between social inequality and neural outcomes, and we discuss ethical issues in conducting this work.

Step 1: Identify Form of Social Inequality to be Evaluated

The first step is to identify the form of social inequality that will be the focus of the investigation. We suggest three specific questions to help inform the selection of this variable. First, what theoretical support exists for this factor? Second, what is the empirical evidence for this factor influencing cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes, and are these processes plausibly related to brain structure and function? Third, how strong is this evidence? Has it been established across multiple methods (e.g., observational, quasi-experimental) and measures? In answering these questions, we encourage scholars to consider literatures outside of cognitive neuroscience, given that the topic of social inequality is an inherently interdisciplinary field. For example, scholarship from sociology, 35 psychology, 36 anthropology, 94 and public health 2 has revealed that stigma and discrimination are structural causes of population-level inequalities. 95 Interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues from these allied disciplines ensures that cognitive neuroscientists are well-versed in the sources of social inequality that may be most relevant to their question of interest.

Step 2: Identify Appropriate Structural Measures of Social Inequality Across Relevant Levels of Analysis

A second step is to identify reliable and valid measures of the social inequality variable of interest. Structural measures, including social attitudes, have been collected by survey research firms or other agencies (e.g., National Opinion Research Center). However, it is often necessary to apply for restricted access to obtain these measures at certain geographic scales (e.g., states, counties). In other instances, structural measures must be assembled by researchers themselves. In these cases, it is advisable to include collaborators on the research team who possess the necessary expertise in the collection of these data, as in the case of social policies. Scholars have also noted the importance of incorporating the perspectives of communities with lived experience in the development of measures of structural inequality (e.g., structural racism), through methods such as community-based participatory research. 96 Doing so ensures that measurement approaches are also ecologically valid.

Another important measurement consideration is the geographic level(s) most relevant for the research question. In the context of social attitudes, it is likely important to obtain them at levels that are most proximate to the respondent (e.g., county). 97 In contrast, for other measures, like laws, states or countries may be the most relevant unit of analysis.

Step 3: Identify the Sample

Once researchers have selected the structural measure(s) of social inequality, they must make decisions regarding the study sample(s). Typically, research on the consequences of social inequality is focused on marginalized groups. As other commentators have noted, sample sizes for minoritized individuals are typically quite small in neuroscience research, 98 and stratified estimates are frequently not reported for key sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., race). 99 To these important points we add that social inequality may influence who is ultimately recruited and retained in research samples, including in neuroscience studies. While such selection factors are often treated as nuisance variables, sociologists have urged scholars to conceptualize selection instead as a social process that is worthy of study in its own right. 100

These observations have important implications for identifying the samples in studies that employ the methodological approaches outlined in this paper. For single-site, single-study approaches, in which researchers are typically collecting their own data, a priori power analysis should be used to determine sufficient sample sizes of marginalized groups. For multi-site studies (whether single- or multi-study), cognitive neuroscientists must rely on previously collected data, and thus should be cognizant that selection processes could operate such that marginalized individuals who are most vulnerable to the consequences of social inequality are the least likely to be included in these neuroimaging studies. Critically, this selection bias most likely leads to an underestimate of the association between social inequality and neural outcomes, a point that is important to consider in evaluating findings across studies.

Step 4: Identify Appropriate Research Design

The next step is the identification of the appropriate research design. See Table 2 for a list of questions across each of the three methodological approaches to help guide the selection of study design for a particular research question.

Step 5: Analysis and Addressing Issues of Causal Inference

In many respects, after Steps 1–4 have been completed, the final step in terms of analysis proceeds according to most other research studies. Cognitive neuroscientists are already intimately acquainted with the error of reverse inference in neuroimaging data. 101 We highlight two additional issues that deserve particular attention when examining social inequalities as predictor variables. The first is the importance of using mixed-effects models (also known as multi-level models) to appropriately account for clustering, given that individuals will be nested within context. In addition, in multi-site, single study approaches, it is often necessary to include random effects for site.

The second issue concerns causal inference. In experimental studies, individuals are randomly assigned to condition; researchers can therefore be reasonably confident that the independent (manipulated) variable caused the dependent variable (outcome), thereby ruling out alternative explanations. It is neither ethical nor feasible to randomly assign individuals to different social contexts. As such, researchers must rely on observational and quasi-experimental designs, which necessitate the use of different strategies for addressing alternative explanations for the observed association between social inequality and neural outcomes. Here, we briefly highlight two such strategies that have been used in extant studies.

One strategy is addressing alternative explanations through statistical controls. Because other features of the social context co-occur with structural forms of inequality, researchers must examine whether their measure of inequality remains associated with the neural outcome(s) over and above other area-level covariates. For instance, Weissman et al. 78 found that state-level policies expanding or restricting the social safety net for low-income families moderated the relationship between family SES and hippocampal volume. In supplementary analyses, they showed that these findings were robust to controls for a wide range of state-level social, economic, and political characteristics (e.g., state preschool enrollment, unemployment). Of course, as with all observational designs, this method cannot rule out the possibility of unmeasured confounding variables, and thus results in such studies can suggest—but not definitively confirm—a causal link.

A second strategy for addressing plausible alternative explanations is the strategic selection of control groups (also known as “negative control analyses”) 102 in which researchers examine whether there is an association in a group where it would not be expected to occur. In one example, Hatzenbuehler et al. 49 showed that structural forms of stigma (e.g., aggregated social attitudes, social policies) were associated with smaller hippocampal volume among Latinx and Black youth. In contrast, structural stigma was unrelated to hippocampal volume in non-stigmatized youth. This evidence for result specificity supports the hypothesis that results are due to structural stigma itself and not to other macro-social factors associated with it (e.g., area-level SES), which should theoretically affect both stigmatized and non-stigmatized youth in similar ways.

There are many other methodological and analytic strategies for marshaling evidence for causality with observational data—including instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and others. Researchers interested in testing neuroscience models using structural data on social inequality should consider collaborating with scholars from economics, sociology, and social epidemiology who have expertise in these various approaches to causal inference.

Ethical Considerations

There is a long, ignominious history of the (mis)use of scientific data with populations who have borne the brunt of the consequences of social inequality. In light of this history, researchers must be especially attentive to how their study might further contribute to the marginalization of certain social groups—especially in the context of public misunderstandings of neuroscience results, such as biological reductionism. 45 Ethical considerations require thoughtful engagement at each step of the research process outlined above—from exploring why researchers are posing their specific questions, to the specific measures they select, to the analytic approaches they employ, to how their results are communicated to the scientific community and broader public. While the harms of historical and contemporary neuroscience practices to marginalized communities have been reviewed recently elsewhere, 103 there are potential benefits as well. Indeed, providing evidence that structural sources of inequality predict neural outcomes locates any group difference in brain structure or function within aspects of the broader social context rather than within individuals; such findings may therefore be less likely to be used to perpetuate stereotypes or to justify discrimination. We refer readers to helpful recommendations for how cognitive neuroscience datasets can be used to advance health equity and to minimize harm. 104

Recommendations for Future Research

Existing studies that we have reviewed in this paper all use observational data, which cannot establish causality. Future research would therefore benefit from utilizing methods from other fields (e.g., econometrics, sociology, epidemiology) to strengthen causal inferences regarding the relationship between social inequalities and neutral outcomes in order to ensure a more robust evidence base. These methods might include quasi-experimental designs that leverage short-term changes in social inequality (e.g., social policies that differentially target marginalized groups for social exclusion), 105 or divergent mobility patterns that naturally occur in longitudinal studies (e.g., movement of respondents to different social contexts, such as moves from higher-to-lower poverty neighborhoods, or higher-to-lower stigmatizing climates). Both types of designs have been effectively used to study biopsychosocial consequences of social inequality, and thus hold promise for cognitive neuroscience (see reviews in the area of stigma and prejudice by Hatzenbuehler; 36 , 106 for an example of mobility studies in economics, see Chetty et al. 107 ).

Several research questions also remain unanswered regarding whether, how, and for whom social inequalities are related to neural outcomes. For instance, our paper examined structural measures of social inequality that have received the most empirical attention in the cognitive neuroscience literature—including structural stigma, community-level prejudice, gender inequality, neighborhood disadvantage, and the generosity of the social safety net for low-income families. Future studies are needed to examine linkages between additional forms of social inequality and neural outcomes, employing the methods that we have outlined in this paper. Examples might include air pollution 108 and access to green spaces, 109 both of which are socially patterned. 108 This research will provide important information regarding potential boundary conditions of the consequences of social inequality for brain structure and function.

In addition, existing studies have focused on direct associations of social inequalities with measures of neural structure and function. Less attention has been paid to identifying the factors that may influence the direction and magnitude of these relationships (i.e., moderators). The identification of moderators at multiple levels of influence—material resources, social, psychological, biological—therefore represents an important area of inquiry. Additional questions for future inquiry include the following: Are the associations between social inequalities and neural outcomes similar across different geographic units of analysis—e.g., city and state—or are these associations stronger at more proximal levels? Do these different units interact to explain variation in neural structure and function, as has been found for various psychological phenomenon, such as identity concealment? 43 Are associations between social inequalities and neural outcomes sensitive to particular developmental periods?

Conclusions

We present a call to action for the field of cognitive neuroscience to begin to grapple with the role that social inequality may play in shaping neural outcomes and highlight emerging findings suggesting that structural approaches may yield new insights into whether and how various dimensions of social inequality relate to neural structure and function. We present three methodological approaches that have recently been utilized to study associations between structural measures of social inequalities and neural outcomes. We hope our paper invigorates new research in cognitive neuroscience that explicitly incorporates upstream contextual factors, which holds potential promise for contributing to public discourse on some of the most meaningful social, health, and policy-related questions of our time.

Competing Interests Statement : The authors declare no competing interests.

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Research Article

The research topic landscape in the literature of social class and inequality

Contributed equally to this work with: Liang Guo, Shikun Li

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Institute of Computational Social Science, Shandong University, Weihai, China

Roles Methodology, Resources, Software

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Engineering Department, Cambridge University, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Affiliation Institut Supérieur de Management et Communication, Paris, France

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Methodology

Affiliation Kantar TNS, Paris, France

Roles Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, United States

• Liang Guo, 
• Shikun Li, 
• Ruodan Lu, 
• Lei Yin, 
• Ariane Gorson-Deruel, 
• Lawrence King

• Published: July 2, 2018
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510
• Reader Comments

The literature of social class and inequality is not only diverse and rich in sight, but also complex and fragmented in structure. This article seeks to map the topic landscape of the field and identify salient development trajectories over time. We apply the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling technique to extract 25 distinct topics from 14,038 SSCI articles published between 1956 to 2017. We classified three topics as “hot”, eight as “stable” and 14 as “cold”, based on each topic’s idiosyncratic temporal trajectory. We also listed the three most cited references and the three most popular journal outlets per topic. Our research suggests that future effort may be devoted to Topics “urban inequalities, corporate social responsibility and public policy in connected capitalism”, “education and social inequality”, “community health intervention and social inequality in multicultural contexts” and “income inequality, labor market reform and industrial relations”.

Citation: Guo L, Li S, Lu R, Yin L, Gorson-Deruel A, King L (2018) The research topic landscape in the literature of social class and inequality. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0199510. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510

Editor: C. Mary Schooling, CUNY, UNITED STATES

Received: October 25, 2017; Accepted: June 9, 2018; Published: July 2, 2018

Copyright: © 2018 Guo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data used in this article can be found in the Core Collection of Web of Science—Clarivate ( http://apps.webofknowledge.com/ ) by executing the following advanced search command: (TS="Social Class" OR TS="Social Classes" OR TS="Social Stratification" OR TS="Social Stratifications" OR TS="Social Inequality" OR TS="Social Inequalities") AND LANGUAGE: (English) AND DOCUMENT TYPES: (Article) Indexes=SSCI Timespan=1956-2017. More information can be found in the section of "Description of the Sample" in the article.

Funding: Liang Guo is supported by the Qilu Project of Shandong University, China. Ruodan Lu is supported by the British EPSRC DTA fund (DTA2014). Ariane Gorson-Deruel receives salary from Kantar TNS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

Competing interests: AGD is an employee of and receives salary from Kantar TNS, a marketing research firm. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Introduction

Social stratification or social class refers to visible societal layers or classes of differing wealth, income, race, education or power [ 1 ]. Social stratification, social class and social inequality (hereafter social class and inequality) are often used interchangeably, all of which are the products of an unequally structured society in which identities are socially produced on a large scale [ 2 ]. As societies evolve, the number of layers can change, and the boundaries between them move. Mobility within and between classes and their persistence from one generation to another influences a society’s governance, customs, culture, identity, and social inequality perception [ 3 ]. Recent so-called “black swan events” (i.e. Donald Trump’ victory in the American election and the Brexit referendum) and the growth of populism in Europe are the vivid examples of how human society is transformed by the struggle between different social classes.

Social scientists have studied social class and inequality at length. In the 19th century, Marxian theories of stratification [ 4 ] considered social inequality as crucial to understand human society. The struggle between the exploited and exploiting classes would eventually lead to a political revolution, which would replace private monopolies by total equality (e.g. the Soviet Union and Communist China). In the early 20th century, Max Weber proposed the three-component theory of stratification, with class, status and power as distinct ideal types and social class manifests itself as unequal access to economic resources [ 5 ] In the late 20th century, Lenski [ 6 ] developed the theory of social stratification, further arguing that the accumulation of information, especially technological information, is the most basic and powerful factor in the evolution of human societies. Technological advances laid the foundations for social inequality in terms of power and wealth distribution.

Based on classic social theories, many studies have empirically examined the determinants and consequences of social class and inequality. Multidisciplinary knowledge in the field is not only diverse and insightful, but also fragmented and multifaceted. There is a pressing need for clear mapping of this ever more complex landscape to help researchers and students to conduct efficient, effective literature reviews. A comprehensive mapping of the field will help by providing an understanding of how it has evolved over time, shedding light on the points of consensus and divergences among scholars, while revealing research gaps in the intellectual structure of the field.

This study comprises a computer-based overview of the social class and inequality literature over the period of 1956–2017. First, we mapped out the topic landscape, and then attempted to anticipate hot topics that will generate seminal research in the future. As far as we know, this is the first systematic review of the field across many disciplines over seven decades and the first attempt to forecast topic prevalence in this literature. Our first contribution lies in uncovering a hidden structure of 25 distinct topics and development trajectories in a corpus comprising the abstracts of 14,038 scholarly articles. This study draws on an unprecedentedly large text corpus that includes a broad range of author backgrounds, disciplinary influences and research focuses. Our study will enable researchers to explore not only topic development paths within the overall literature, but also the most salient articles in each individual topic. Our second contribution lies in forecasting the popularities of these 25 topics, based on each topic’s temporal idiosyncrasies which will help both researchers and journal editors to select promising research topics. In the next section, we briefly introduce topic modeling techniques and applications in modeling scientific literature. Then we describe our analyses and results. And finally, we discuss the implications of our work for scholars, journal editors, and practitioners.

Topic modeling methodology

A document can be represented as a vector of word term weights (i.e. features) from a set of terms (i.e. dictionary) and the topic of a document is made of a joint membership of terms which have a pattern of occurrence [ 7 ]. Early document clustering techniques employ the vector space modeling technique, which can calculate the similarity between two documents [ 8 ]. This technique fails to deal with the issues caused by synonymy (i.e. different words with similar or identical meanings) and polysemy (i.e. the words with different meanings in different contexts). Later, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was developed in an effort to improve classification performance in document retrieval [ 9 ]. Like most topic modeling techniques, LSA starts from a pre-processing step, which cleans the corpus of a set of text documents and builds a document-term matrix for subsequent modeling. The cleaning procedures include tokenization (i.e. partitioning a text document into a list of tokens), stop-word removal (i.e. removing the words that are extremely common but are of little value in helping classifying documents, such as this, it, is), stemming and lemmatization (i.e. removing the ends of conjugated verbs or plural nouns while keeping the lemma, base or root form), and compound words (i.e. concatenating hyphenated words that describe one concept). The remaining words are used to construct a document-term-matrix (DTM). The DTM is a matrix where each row represents a document, each column represents a unique word, and each cell denotes the number of times a given word appears in a given document. Then, LSA reduces the DTM into a filtered DTM through singular value decomposition (SVD). Finally, LSA computes the similarity between text documents to pick the heist efficient related words. While computationally efficient, LSA fails to identify and distinguish between different contexts of word usage without recourse to a dictionary or thesaurus [ 10 ].

Backed by Bayesian statistics, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is developed to apply a probabilistic model to analyze word distributions in text documents and uncover topics in an automated fashion [ 7 , 11 ]. This generative modeling technique does not require prior categorization, labelling and annotation of the texts but reveals the invisible, latent topic structure through statistical procedures [ 12 ]. Instead, it follows the “bag-of-words” assumption to treat a document as a vector containing the count of each word type, regardless the order in which they appear. In a nutshell, LDA assumes that each document can be modelled as a mixture of topics, and each topic is a discrete probability distribution that defines how likely each word is to appear in a given topic. A document is then represented by a distribution of topic probabilities. It estimates the parameters in the distributions of word and of topics with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations [ 7 ]. LDA then assigns topics to each document through a Dirichlet distribution of topics. Given a specific number of topics in a collection of text documents, the extent to which each topic (and its associated words) is represented in a specific document can be modelled by a latent variable model, where latent variables represent the topics and how each document in the collection manifests them [ 7 , 13 ]. In short, LDA discovers patterns of word use and connect patterns of similar use to estimate the posterior distribution of hidden variables, which represents the topic structure of the collection [ 12 , 13 ].

Recently, some LDA-based techniques have been proposed. For example, Correlated-Topic-Model (CTM) uses a logistic normal distribution to create relations among topics [ 13 ]. Supervised LDA [ 14 ] can introduce known label information into the topic discovery process. Labeled LDA (LLDA) [ 15 ] allows for multiple labels of documents and for the relation of labels to topics represents one-to-one mapping. Partially labeled LDA (PLLDA) [ 16 ] further extends LLDA to have latent topics missing from the given document labels.

LDA has been widely used to process otherwise unmanageably large volumes of text, identify the most salient topic in a single document, investigate similarities between documents, and uncover topic prevalence over time [ 11 , 13 , 17 ]. We summarize some recent applications of LDA in scientific topic discovery in Table 1 .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t001

Description of the sample

We extracted article abstracts from the core collection of the Web of Science (WoS) database using the following criteria: articles published in English, whose topic terms (i.e. titles, abstracts and keywords) included “social stratification(s)”, “social class(es)” or “social inequality(ies)” in SSCI indexed journals over the period of 1956 to December 2017. The search found 15,057 articles. We deleted those without keywords and abstracts, leaving 14,038 articles in the collection. Among these articles, 67.11% belong to “social class(es)” alone, 23.60% to “social inequality(ies)” alone and 6.71% to “social stratification(s)” alone. There are 1.74% of articles that belong to both “social class(es)” and “social inequality(ies)”; 0.52% to “social class(es)” and “social stratification(s)”; and 0.26% to both “social inequality(ies)” and “social stratification(s)”. There are only 0.04% of articles that belong to three topic terms.

In addition, we built three time series in terms of annual article counts for these three terms respectively. The correlation coefficients between “social class(es)” and “social inequality(ies)” series is 0.87, between “social class(es)” and “social stratification(s)” series is 0.86, and between “social inequality(ies)” and “social stratification(s)” series is 0.97. These statistics confirm that the three topic themes are highly similar. They all reflect the types of social divisions envisaged by Marx and refer to groups defined by their relationship to ownership and control over the means of production, of labor and of distribution [ 18 ]. We did not include the term “social status” because it emphasizes the social distinctions caused not only by economic factors but also by cultural ones, which include denotative (what is), normative (what should be), and stylistic (how done) beliefs, shared by a group of individuals who have undergone a common historical experience and participate in an interrelated set of social structures [ 19 ].

Analyses and results

Descriptive statistics.

Fig 1 depicts the yearly distribution of articles in terms of annual article counts and the percentage of our sample article counts to the total number of SSCI articles per year (hereafter, publication percentage). The field has grown substantially over the last seven decades. There were only 12 articles (0.04%) published in 1956, but this figure changed to 1,001(0.31%) in 2017. The average annual growth rate in the field reached 5.99%. A systematic change in both series of article count and of publication percentage can be identified over time. The year of 1991 is a change point in the field, as the growth rate in this year jumped from 16.71% in the previous year to 166.98%. And from 1991 onward, the publication percentage (mean = 0.24%, std. = 0.06%) was much higher than that in previous years (mean = 0.05%, std. = 0.02%).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.g001

The authors of these articles are from 128 countries, especially USA (36.69%), UK (25.64%) and Canada (5.96%). The ten most frequent organizations in the sample are University College London (2.89%), Harvard University (2.05%), University of Michigan (1.91%), University of Helsinki (1.79%), University of Edinburgh (1.55%), University of Bristol (1.44%), University of Toronto (1.33%), Karolinska Institute (1.29%), University of Cambridge (1.28%), and University of Copenhagen (1.22%).

The articles spread in 112 WoS research areas. Table 2 summarizes Top 10 research areas, which account for around 93.33% of the sample articles. These articles were published in 2,495 journals, among which, Social Science Medicine , Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health , and European Journal of Public Health are the three most frequent outlets in the field (see Table 3 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t002

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t003

Grid search of the optimal number of topics

We first built a corpus containing the titles, keywords, and abstracts of all sample articles. All texts were converted to lower case. We removed stop-words as well as punctuation based on the standard NLTK list and reduced the remaining words to their stems. We then used an algorithm developed by Wang, McCallum, & Wei [ 20 ] to replace n-grams with compound words in the text documents. To speed up the modelling process, we followed Blei and Lafferty [ 13 ], Hornik and Grun [ 21 ], and Antons et al [ 12 ] in including only the terms in a topic model whose term-frequency-inverse-document-frequency (tf-idf) values are just above the median of all tf-idf values of the entire vocabulary. These preprocessing procedures resulted in a DTM for further analyses.

We conducted LDA topic modeling analysis with the Genism package [ 22 ]. The first step was to perform a two-stage grid-search procedure [ 12 ] to find the optimal number of topics in our collection. We computed a model set of 3–103 topics in step of 10 (i.e. 3, 13, 23 ∆103), each of which repeats 30 times circumvent the impact of random resampling within LDA. Each model was evaluated by the semantic coherence score with the algorithms of Newman, Lau, Grieser, & Baldwin [ 23 ] and of Mimno, Wallach, Talley, Leenders, & McCallum [ 24 ]. A good topic model with the optimal number should make the semantic coherence score as large as possible [ 25 ]. The first-stage grid search procedure suggested that the semantic coherence score was the largest (-61.91) when number of topics k was three and the second largest (-99.81) when k was 33. Given that it is unlikely to categorize a large collection of articles like ours into just three topics, we decided the optimal number of topics of the first-stage grid search procedure as k first-stage = 33. Then we conducted the second-stage grid search procedure by computing a model set of k first-stage +/- 10 in step of one (i.e. 23, 24, 25,…,42, 43). The second stage procedure suggests that the topic coherence score reaches its maximum when the number of topics is 25. Then, we used Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to re-do the two-stage grid-search procedure for the sake of robustness check. The topic coherence scores of LSA were also shown in Fig 2 , in which the best topic number seems to be 23 (see Fig 2 ). These results suggested that our collection of articles could be modelled into more than 20 but less than 30 topics. Note that LDA is proved to be more accurate and robust than LSA [ 7 ]. Therefore, we chose the result obtained from the LDA grid-search analysis (25).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.g002

We assessed topic modeling quality in the following ways. Firstly, we plotted the distances of 25 topics in Fig 3 with the multidimensional scaling (MDS) method. Fig 3 confirms the high quality of the 25-topic model, as topics do not cluster but spread evenly through unit spaces.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.g003

Then, we computed the likelihood of each article covering each of the 25 topics with LDA. Note that LDA is a mix-membership model, which means that each document is represented as a mixture of a set of topics and each topic is regarded as a distribution over the words in the vocabulary [ 26 ]. We assigned each article to the dominant topic whose topic loading was the highest. We presented the topic modeling results in Table 4 . The values of the highest topic loadings of these articles range from 0.96 to 0.11 (mean = 0.56, std. = 0.14). Antons et al [ 12 ] argue that an article does not contain a meaningful topic if the loading to this topic is smaller than 0.10. Therefore, the highest topic loadings of all articles were valid.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t004

Finally, we evaluated the level of topic diversity with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which has been used in a commonly accepted measure of market or portfolio diversification. As a rule of thumb, a market with an HHI of less than 0.10 is a competitive or diverse marketplace, an HHI of 0.10 to 0.25 is a moderately concentrated marketplace, and an HHI of 0.25 or greater is a highly concentrated or monopolistic marketplace [ 27 ]. Analogically, for each article, we squared the topic loading of each topic, and then summing the resulting numbers, which can range from close to zero to one. We followed the same vein of market competition analysis to define that an article contains diverse topics if its HHI is smaller than 0.10; an article contains important topics if its HHI is of 0.10 to 0.18; an article contains a salient topic if its HHI is 0.18 or greater. If there are many articles of diverse topics, then the number of topics chosen may be problematic, as LDA fails to extract dominant topics that are distinct from other topics. We found that 57.71% of the articles are of a salient topic, 38.60 of a few important topics while only 3.69% are of diverse topics. The MDS, the analyses of topic loadings and of topic diversity provide solid supports to the fact that our LDA topic model with 25 topics is of high quality, as the significant topics hidden in each article have been successfully retrieved.

Topic landscape

We manually labeled each topic in the following manner. Firstly, we downloaded the full texts of the 20 articles whose loadings were the highest within each topic and invited 50 graduate students to read them carefully. That is, each student read 20 randomly-chosen articles and each article was read by two students. Each student proposed a preliminary label for each topic. At the same time, the author team read the abstracts of the 50 highest loading articles per topic. Finally, the author team organized several workshops with the students to finalize the labels. For 21 of the 25 topics, the students suggested labels that were identical or highly similar to those generated by the author team. We discussed the four topics for which the labels assigned by the students and the author team differed significantly to reach a consensus on the most appropriate topic labels.

The number of articles per topic ranges from 252 to 1,172 (mean = 562.2, std. = 249.00). The three most prevalent topics are “globalization, modernization and social class evolution” (Topic 5), “education and social inequality” (Topic 9) and “urban inequality, corporate social responsibility and public policy in connected capitalism” (Topic 22), each of which contains more than 1,000 articles. The three least prevalent topics are “preventive health inequality” (Topic 4), “criminal justice, terrorism, lifestyle exposure and victimization in different social classes” (Topic 10), and “sociolinguistics and social inequality” (Topic 15), each of which contains fewer than or around 300 articles. In addition, “urban inequality, corporate social responsibility and public policy in connected capitalism” (Topics 22), “mortality and social inequality” (Topic 13), and “cancer and social inequality” (Topic 8) exhibit the three highest average loadings (>0.42), indicating that the articles covering these topics tend to be more similar than those covering relatively low-loading ones, for example, “social class schema and theoretical debates” (Topic 3, average loading = 0.26), “discrimination, social value, and gender and racial inequality” (Topic 7, average loading = 0.29) and “pathways of social inequality and psychosocial health” (Topic 25, average loading = 0.28).

Finally, we listed the three most cited references and the three most frequent outlets per topic in Tables 5 and 6 . These cited references and outlets can be regarded as the field’s principal knowledge sources. In general, Krieger, Williams, & Moss [ 28 ] has been cited in 12 topics, and Liberatos, Link, & Kelsey [ 29 ] in nine. Pierre Bourdieu’s work [ 30 , 31 ] is also extensively and widely cited in many topics. In addition, Social Science & Medicine is one of Top 3 outlets in 16 topics, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 10 topics, and American Journal of Public Health in five topics.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t005

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t006

Topic dynamics

Given that the field in general has experienced substantial growth after 1991, we discussed the temporal dynamics of each topic in two periods (i.e. 1956–1990 and 1991–2017). We constructed 26 time series (i.e. the field and the 25 topics, shown in Fig 1 and S1 Fig ). The publication percentage of the field has grown significantly in both pre-1991 (mean = 3.03%) and post 1991 periods (mean = 9.12%). There are 16 topics that experienced a decline before 1991 but all of them strongly bounded up after 1991. For example, the publication percentage of “Cancer and social inequality” (Topic 8) shrink (on average -26.11% per year) before 1991 but expanded (on average 6.71% per year) in the second period. None of the 25 topics declined in the post-1991 period. In particular, “smoking, diet and active health promotion activities in different social classes” (Topic 20) has increased on average 54.94% per year, “heart disease, work environment and social inequality” (Topic 6) increased on average 39.61% and “education and social inequality” (Topic 9) increased on average 26.05%.

Some topics, such as “smoking, diet and active health promotion activities in different social classes” (Topic 20), “childhood social class and adulthood health” (Topic 21), and “preventive health inequality” (Topic 4), did not appear in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not until the 1990s that all 25 topics were present. “Social class schema and theoretical debates” (Topic 3) was prevalent in 1960s and 1970s but suddenly becomes much less popular in the following decades.

Then, we intended to identify the trends in the filed as a whole and in each topic using time series forecasting technique. We did not follow conventional trend analysis to employ linear and quadratic time trend regressions for the series of article counts. That is because, on the one hand, article count series usually exhibits strong autocorrelation, which manifests in correlated residuals after a regression model has been fit. The autocorrelation violates the standard assumption of independent errors [ 32 ]. On the other hand, article counts do not take the consistent growth in all SSCI publications over time into account, which makes the results obtained by regressions spurious. Therefore, we chose Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) technique. The AR part can be conceived as a linear regression on previous time series values and the MA part is conceptually regarded as a linear regression of the current value of the series against prior random shocks. The I (for “integrated”) part the data values have been replaced with the difference between their values and one or several previous values, which allow non-stationary series to be modeled. Explicitly catering to a suite of standard structures in time series data, ARIMA provides a simple yet powerful method for making skillful time series forecasts [ 33 ].

We constructed 26 time series and identified the appropriate ARIMA terms following the conventional Box-Jenkins Methodology [ 33 ]:

Firstly, we split a series into a training part (80%, i.e. 1956–2005) and a test part (20%, i.e. 2006–2017). We used the Augmented Dickey–Fuller test to identify the appropriate order of differencing (i.e. the d parameter) for the training series. Secondly, we specified the number of AR order with the partial autocorrelation function (PACF) plot for the training series. The PACF displays the autocorrelation of each lag of a series after controlling for the auto correlation caused by all preceding lags [ 34 ]. If there is a sharp drop in the PACF of a series after p lags, then an ARIMA model should include p autoregressive terms as the previous p -values are responsible for the autocorrelation in the series [ 35 ]. Thirdly, we specified the number of MA terms by plotting the ACF of the training series. If the ACF is non-zero for the first q lags and then drops toward zero, then an ARIMA model should include q MA terms [ 34 ]. Fourthly, we fitted an ARIMA with the identified order parameters (i.e. p , d , q ) to the training series. To verify the quality of this model, we plotted its residual to see whether it appears as entirely random white noise and conducted the Ljung-Box test to formally check whether the errors are uncorrelated across many lags [ 36 , 37 ]. Otherwise, we improved the model upon by removing all the remaining trend. Finally, we tested the improved model with the test series and computed the scores of RMSE, AIC and BIC.

To check the robustness of our ARIMA order specifications, we conducted a grid-search by estimating 1,125 ARIMA models with different combinations of orders (i.e. d = [0,5], p = [0,15], q = [0,15]). By comparing these models with the manually specified optimal model in terms of the Ljung-Box test of residuals, AIC and BIC, the ARIMA grid-search results confirm that our order specifications were indeed optimal (i.e. the Ljung-Box test is statistically insignificant and the values of RMSE, AIC and BIC are minimum). Results were summarized in Table 7 and S1 Fig .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.t007

We employed the optimized ARIMA models to forecast the publication percentages of the field and of each topic for the next ten years (i.e. 2018–2027) respectively. The forecast average annual growth rate was used as the indicator of future topic prevalence (see Table 7 ). The field may continue to expand in the next decade, as its annual growth rate will be 2.51%, suggesting that the field of social class and inequality will consistently attract significant attention in multidisciplinary research communities. We classified the 25 topics into three categories using the following criteria: hot topics for those whose forecast annual growth rates are higher than or equal to the one of the field (i.e. 2.51%), stable topics for those whose rates are positive or equal to zero but smaller than the one of the field, and cold topics for those whose rates are negative. There are three hot topics, eight stable topics and 14 cold topics. We discussed these findings in the next section.

Discussion and conclusions

The aim of this study is to provide a systematic review of social class and inequality research over the last seven decades: its evolution, topic landscape, and dynamics. Our topic modelling analyses considerably enhance understanding of the hidden structure of 25 distinct topics covering the overall development in the field. In addition, our analysis of topic dynamics reveals the highly fluctuated nature of the field’s content structure. Our forecasting results suggest that while in general, the field will continue to attract more attention, 14 topics may lose their popularities. In particular, “skeletal, dental and cranial anthropology and social stratification throughout history” (Topic 2) will dramatically shrink -241.18%, followed by “sociolinguistic research and social inequality (Topic 15, -20.01%) and “preventive health inequality” (Topic 4, -6.50%). These findings seem to be reasonable, given that the three topics are not mainstream in the field, all of which took up less than 2.5% of the articles respectively.

In addition, the 25 topics can be roughly divided into two categories. The 15 medicine-related research topics dominate the field, comprising 54.86% of the articles. This is not surprising, given that healthcare, the sociology of illness, and the social organization of medicine are among the fastest growing areas of modern research. Studies in these topics use core principles and concepts of medical sociology to elucidate the determinants and consequences of various types of illness and wellness (e.g. oral health, prenatal care and psychology). These articles have extensively examined the socioeconomic risk factors of health and their iatrogenic repercussions. Such research contributes to the field of social class and inequality by exploring the social meaning of illness, by examining the issue of care-taking as well as care-giving actions related to familial, community and governmental responsibilities, and by deconstructing health inequalities grounded in social stratifications. Our research suggests that in general, the research in these topics has substantially grown and matured, because that the forecast annual growth rates of many medicine-related research topics are either negative or close to zero. That is probably because many studies have reached a consensus that the problems of access to health care, inequality in medical coverage, and the influence of oppressive social structures make ‘health’ impossible for many people confined in an unfavorable class position [ 38 ]. Future efforts may be devoted to “community health, intervention and social inequality in multicultural contexts” (Topic 14), whose forecast annual growth rate will reach 8.53%.

The second category of work in our collection is social sciences-oriented, focusing on topics related to education inequality, social structure evolution, the impact of globalization, business development and public policies. There may be research gaps in “education and social inequality” (Topic 9, whose forecast annual growth rate will be 3.69%) and “income inequality, labor market reform and industrial relations” (Topic 16, whose forecast annual growth rate will be 1.63%). Growing inequality is regarded as one of the most important developments in today’s industrial relations. This phenomenon has been most pronounced in the West, where rising support for populism has disrupted politics and challenged corporate capitalism in many countries [ 39 ]. Future research may give special attention to emerging forms of organizational restructuring and labor market institutions, such as trade union power, wage regulations and the influence of the Artificial Intelligence-based fourth industrial revolution.

In conclusion, this study applies LDA topic modelling to structure a large text corpus effectively. By doing so, we enable researchers to examine the detailed profile of each topic and estimate its relative salience. By describing the whole body of knowledge at a relatively granular level, we contribute to a rich understanding of the field’s topic landscape. As such, researchers can appreciate the full range of topics and select those they wish to examine in depth. In addition, our topic landscape informs social class and inequality teaching and course design. Instructors can identify important topics to cover in a course, and include relevant articles associated with each topic. Our study also helps postgraduate students and junior researchers identify which research topics to examine. Finally, our findings have many meaningful implications for journal editors. They can compare the field’s current topic landscape against their journal’s editorial priorities, and thus choose promising topics to be reflected in the composition of the editorial board or promoted through special issues.

However, our study may be of some limitations. Our sample articles were collected from WoS. Although it is probably the single most authoritative source for “high-impact” publications and has a relatively better coverage of social sciences and arts/humanities than other academic databases, WoS focuses mainly mainstream journals and articles, especially those in English. As a result, our analyses excluded articles published in emerging journals, in non-English languages and other types of publications (e.g. books, conference papers, technical reports, theses and dissertations). Future studies may collect publication records from Google Scholar, as it covers book contents along with other freely-accessible online publications. In addition, we did not take the correlations between topics into account so that we cannot forecast how the values of one topic will be correlated with those of other topics. Future work may employ multivariate time series methods to capture the associations between topic time series. Finally, we did not specify forecasting models with any external bibliometric factors that may correlate with the growth or decline of a topic time series. Future work should investigate bibliometric determinants of topic dynamics.

Supporting information

S1 fig. the temporal trajectories of 25 topics..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199510.s001

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150 Social Justice Essay Topics & Examples

⭐ top 10 social justice issues to write about, 🏆 best social justice topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ simple & easy social justice essay titles, 📌 most interesting social justice topics to write about, 👍 good social justice research topics, ❓ research questions about social justice.

Social justice essays are an excellent tool for demonstrating your awareness of the current issues in society.

Inequality in society should be addressed, and social justice advocates are at the forefront of such initiatives. Everyone should be able to achieve their goals and dreams if they put in the effort, assuming of course that reaching that target is at all possible.

To that end, you should ask various social justice essay questions and investigate different situations, particularly those that surround marginalized communities.

While the civil rights movement has succeeded in eliminating discriminatory policies and gender segregation, people should remain vigilant so that inequality again.

There are many topics you can discuss in your essay, but is better to focus on something specific and conduct a detailed investigation. It is easy to take some examples of data that shows a situation that seems unequal and declare that the system is flawed.

However, the data may be inaccurate, and the causes may be different from what you initially perceive them to be. Many fields will be too small for statistic laws to apply, and so there will be a temporary prevalence of people with a specific trait.

Declarations of premature conclusions and calls to action based on these conjectures are not productive and will generally lead to harm.

Be sure to consider evidence from both sides when discussing the topic of injustice, especially in its sensitive applications.

The case of police officers and the racial disparity in arrests is a prominent example, as there is significant disagreement, and neither side can be considered entirely correct.

At other times, unequal treatments may be explained by racial and gender differences without the application of discriminatory practices, particularly with regards to cultural practices.

The importance of justice is above debate, but it is not always about declaring one side correct while the other is wrong and at fault. Humanity operates best when it is unified and follows the same purpose of fairness.

Lastly, try to avoid confusing equality with equity, as the two social justice essay topics are significantly different. The former involves similar starting conditions and opportunities for all people, though they will likely achieve varying successes in life.

The latter means equality of outcomes, meaning that the unsuccessful receive support, which logically has to come at the expense of those who succeed.

You may support either position, with equality being a more traditional concept that seems logical to many people and equity being considered effective at improving the conditions of marginalized communities. However, make your position clear, as the difference is critical and informs your personal concept of social justice.

Here are some additional tips for your paper:

• Separate the points you make in your essay with social justice essay titles. These titles will help the reader navigate the paper and understand your main claims.
• Try to introduce original ideas instead of contributing to ongoing debates. An essay does not allow enough space to let you add something that will change the situation to such discussions.
• The topic of social justice is inherently political, as most suggestions will involve policy-level changes. However, you should try to distance yourself from politics and work with factual information.

Visit IvyPanda to find more social justice essay examples and other useful paper samples to boost your creative process!

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• Discrimination in Voting.
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• Religion, Politics, and Social Justice Organized religions want to change and implement rebranding to fit the new trend, concentrating on social justice in general rather than the individual spiritual aspirations of a person or a family.
• Social Justice and Its Relevance in This Century To put the issue in perspective, he references the civil rights movement of the 1960s and juxtaposes it against the fact that the US had a black president.
• Social Justice, Diversity and Workplace Discrimination It also includes the fair distribution of the national wealth and resources among all citizens and the unbiased treatment of all individuals.
• Social Justice: Why Do Violations Happen? If there is social inequality in a society, it must be corrected to serve the interests of the most oppressed groups of the population.
• Social Justice From the Biblical Point of View Furthermore, all oppressed and poor people are considered to be “righteous” in the Bible because it “is a reflection of God’s faithful love in action and his desire for justice and righteousness in this world”.
• Definition of Social Justice and Social Justice in Leadership They should evaluate the situation, identify areas that need improvement and develop a plan to support the achievement of social justice.
• Social Justice Leadership and Supervision While the concepts of leadership and supervision tend to be referenced within the clinical contend and primarily apply to the responsibilities of the professionals in mental institutions, the issues articulated in the article and chapters […]
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• Social Justice in the US Healthcare System Social justice is a relatively broad concept, the interpretation of which often depends on the political and economic views of an individual.
• Conceptualizing Supervision in Search of Social Justice Based on these findings, it could be concluded that Social justice leadership is meant to become the remedy and the ideological, political, and medical opponent of the dominant positivist biomedical paradigm.
• Researching HIV, AIDS and Social Justice Disney claims that poverty and social injustice lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS among underprivileged people in all countries. The disease was a kind of stigma and infected people were subjected to discrimination and alienation.
• Equal Pay Convention Ratified by New Zealand and Ensuring Social Justice This paper seeks to identify whether the ratification of the International Labour Organisation equal pay for an equal value of work Convention by New Zealand delivered social justice to the women in the New Zealand […]
• Influence of Socioeconomic Status and Social Justice on Health in the US In the video, Richard David and James Collins have determined that racism, inappropriate social policies, and chronic stress are major social factors that lead to the delivery of low-weight babies among African American women.
• Social Justice Perspective Thus public health deals not only with the guarantee of a long healthy life but also regulate and control the death rate, try to expand the life interval, and other things that the policy of […]
• Deaf Youth: Social Justice Through Media and Activism The Deaf Youth USA for instance strives to educate, inspire, and empower the deaf youth to make difference in the communities.
• Social Justice and Feminism in America So as to make a change in this situation, the feminists in America took efforts to improve the condition of women.
• Equality of Opportunity and Social Justice: Affirmative Action If this is the situation in advanced nations of the world, the plight in the newly emerging states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America can easily be imagined as to how difficult would it be […]
• Christianity Religion and Asian World: Social Justice It was also said that the greatest botched opportunity in all church history was in the 1260s the court of the great Kublai Khan asked the Polos when they returned to Italy in 1269 to […]
• Social Justice for Indigenous Women in Canada However, the problem of social justice or, to be more accurate, the lack thereof becomes especially poignant when considering criminal issues and their management, as well as the factors that contribute to reducing the rates […]
• Social Justice in Quality Health Care The provision of accessible health services is necessary to minimize the health risks of the low-income households and improve their quality of life.
• What Is Social Justice? To my mind, the two most important principles of justice that should be used to govern within a just society are the selection of highly virtuous state leaders and government representatives to put in charge […]
• Social Justice: Philosophy of Employment The philosophy of empowerment supports dignity and self-worth; as such, value to all people, regardless of their status or race is an important rule of empowerment.
• American Women’s Movements for Social Justice Like Alice Walker, Deborah Gray, and Collins, Tyra Banks continues the legacy of black women since she is ready to campaign against racism, sexism, and discrimination.
• Social Justice Group Work for Homeless Young Mothers The group discussed in the article was started for the purpose of assisting residents address the problem of homelessness especially in aspects of parenting and during pregnancy periods.
• Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: An Anthology In that way, the authors noted that racial and ethnic differences tend to produce impact on lives of communities in the entirety of their aspects, and thus can aggravate other social justice issues.
• Health Care Services: Social Justice Analysis For instance, the level of poverty in the USA is on the rise, and many people simply have no funds to purchase their health insurance. In conclusion, it is possible to note that social justice […]
• Black Lives Matter and Social Justice Social media is a new public platform that has proved to be extremely effective in fighting against the normalization of violence against African-Americans.
• Ethics and Social Justice in Education Policies The real-life problem that contributes to those controversies is the multicultural genuineness of the community that was exposed to the federal and state standard reforms that transpired throughout the last ten years.
• Administrative Constitutionalism and Social Justice The current point of view at the crimes and violence is predestined by the commercial pressure applied to the mass media sources. In the majority of the cases, popular media becomes the viral source of […]
• Counselors as Social Justice Advocates The compelling vision of social justice is to achieve “free, full, and equal participation” of all groups in society to realize their aspirations and mutual needs.
• U.S. Postal Service’s Ethics and Social Justice In spite of the fact that the current agency was organized in 1971, the background of the organization is related to the development of the first postal service in the country based on the U.S.
• David Miller’s Theory of Desert in Social Justice The dependence of rewards on the variety of external and conditional factors makes the public and scholars question the idea of the desert and its use for justice.
• Ethics Issues: Social Justice In other words, it is observed that an individual has a duty of ensuring that the law is followed while the government is expected to provide the basic rights and freedoms.
• Education and Social Justice The society should also reduce the gap between the poor and the rich. The current level of inequality explains why “every school should reinvent itself in order to deal with social injustice”.
• Social justice and the black – white achievement gap From a national perspective, the achievement gap between the Black and White is reported to have narrowed down in 2007 as compared to the same gap in 1990.
• Setting an Agenda for Social Justice According to Wilkinson, Brundrett is a professor of Educational Research in the Faculty of Education, Community, and Leisure and the head of the Centre for Research and Evaluation, in the Liverpool John Moores University.
• Prosperity and Social Justice The short story was also the subject of debate when it was first written because it failed to fit in any particular genre at the time.”The Yellow Wallpaper” was mostly considered a horror story when […]
• Social Justice: Wray’s Essential Aspects of Biblical Law and Justice Wray has conducted an extensive study on the subject of social justice and suggests that students taking any course on law or social justice must go back to the origins of these laws and justice, […]
• Social Justice: The Catholic’s Social Teachings on Justice The church also seeks to instill value in the prisoners’ lives through teachings and practices that accept prisoners as people who deserve to be treated with dignity.
• Social and Criminal Justice Responses to Sex Work The negative attitude of the community and the criminalization of sex works made workers of his industry vulnerable and susceptible for the physical assaults of men in the street, their customers and even policemen.
• Social Justice and the Australian Indigenous People The main idea behind the formation of the social justice commission was to give the indigenous Australian people choice by empowering them to stand up for their rights.
• Is Social Justice the Same Thing as Political Egalitarianism? An Analysis from a Theory of Justice Perspective This is the question that is likely to arise when one is analyzing social justice in the context of political developments in the society.
• Social Justice and Gay Rights This perception of gays was radically reformed thanks to the efforts of gay rights movements which trace their roots to the 1960s and the Stonewall Riots of 1969 which marked the birth of the gay […]
• The People Demand Social Justice: The Social Protest in Israel as an Agoral Gathering
• The Woman Who Spoke of Love and Social Justice
• Peace and Eco-Social Justice: Failed Distributive Justice, Violence and Militancy in India
• Spirituality, Women ‘s Issues, Sustainability, and Social Justice
• Multicultural Counseling Social Justice and Advocacy Reaction
• The Paradox of Dominate Ideologies in The Fight of Social Justice
• Letter from Birmingham Jail’ by Martin Luther King Jr. and Social Justice
• Richard Spencer and the Issues of Social Justice and White Nationalism
• The Moving Beyond Pity and Inspiration: Disability as a social Justice Issue by Eli Clare
• The Importance of Human Rights and Social Justice
• Social Justice: The Role of Higher Education, Criminality and Race
• Turning Points in the Lives of Chinese and Indian Women Leaders Working Toward Social Justice
• Paulo Freire’s Social Justice Idea
• Producing and Practicing Social Justice in Education
• Urban Social Justice: The Gentrification Debate
• The Role of Education in Society as Explained in Conell’s Social Justice in Education
• The Issues of the Canadian Social Services and Social Justice Domain
• Wellbeing, Freedom, and Social Justice: The Capability Approach
• The Principle of Social Justice and Advocacy Support
• The Biblical Prophets’ Teachings on the Love of God in Social Justice
• The Relationship Between Free Market and Social Justice
• Uneasy Bedfellows: Social Justice and Neo-Liberal Practice in the Housing Market
• The Ethics of Pricing and Access to Health Care: A Social Justice Issue
• Measuring Attitudes Toward Distributive Justice: The Basic Social Justice Orientations Scale
• The Importance of the Covenant House as a Symbol of Christian Social Justice
• Social Justice Orientation and Multicultural Environment
• The New Political Economy of J. S. Mill: The Means to Social Justice
• The ‘s Coat of Arms Are Trust, Empathy, and Social Justice
• The Vietnam War and Its Impact on The Creation of Social Justice
• Race Relations and Social Justice Problems
• Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice in Nonmetropolitan America
• Rape Culture, Rapth, and the Cycles of Social Justice
• The Three Social Justice Issues That Fires Me Up as a Citizen in the United States
• Reading Baldwin After Harvey: Why Climate Change Is a Social Justice Issue
• The Importance of Social Justice Is Universal Across
• Effective Practice During The Social Justice System
• The Issue of Social Justice Activism in Various Social Media Networks
• Sustainable Development and Social Justice: Expanding the Rawlsian Framework of Global Justice
• Once Upon Today: Teaching for Social Justice with Postmodern Picturebook
• The Congressional Black Caucus Use of Social Media for Social Justice Issues
• The Effective Teaching Techniques of Lisa Espinosa in Providing Information on the Topic of Cultural Relevance and Social Justice
• Reading Baldwin After Harvey: Why Climate Change Is a Social Justice Issue?
• How Does Social Justice Highlight the Relationship Between Social Welfare and Crime Control?
• Social Justice and Academic Success: Is Individual Effort Enough?
• Rawls’s Theory of Social Justice: How Decisions Are Made?
• Are Consultation and Social Justice Advocacy Similar Exploring the Perceptions?
• How Arc Advances Social Justice?
• What Are the Different Factors Affect Social Justice?
• What Does the Information Society Mean for Social Justice and Civil Society?
• What Is the Connection Between Curricular Practices, Social Justice and Democratic Purpose in the United States Education System?
• How the United States Has Both Market and Social Justice?
• What Is the Impact of Social Justice on The United States?
• What Is the Impact of Social Justice on Human Development?
• How Does Social Justice Actions Project?
• When High Pressure, System Constraints, and a Social Justice Mission Collide?
• What Is the Concept of Social Justice Social Work?
• What Is the Connection Between Free Market and Social Justice?
• What Is the Goal of Social Justice Education?
• What Social Justice Issues Are You Most Passionate About?
• What Is Consist Social Justice Western Perspectives?
• How Social Justice Course Changed My Outlook?
• What Are the Three Social Justice Issues That Fires Up as a Citizen in the United States?
• What Has Limited the Impact of UK Disability Equality Law on Social Justice?
• What Is Rawls’ Expanding Framework for Global Justice?
• How Does the Film “Lord of Flies” Relate to Social Justice?
• Does the Legal System Promote Social Justice?
• Are the People Demand Social Justice?
• Social Justice and the University Community: Does Campus?
• What Does “Social Justice” Mean?
• What Does Teaching for Social Justice Mean for Teachers?
• Why Is Education a Social Justice and Right for Each Child?
• Children’s Rights Research Ideas
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• Sociological Perspectives Titles
• Idealism Paper Topics
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Social Inequality

1 gender equality in sports: overcoming stereotypes.

Introduction Gender inequality is a broad topic that can be examined in many different aspects. Today, Gender inequality is a huge issue, and this issue should be addressed, and we should act. I feel that it is very unfair how men and women get treated unequally. A woman and a male can work the same […]

2 Advancing Gender Equality for a More Equitable Society

Introduction Gender inequality isn’t just a female issue but a human issue. “All men are created equal,” once said Thomas Jefferson, a contributor to the Declaration of Independence. Gender inequality is a prominent issue here in America. Strikes, boycotts, and rallies regarding gender inequality try to urge people to take a stand and fight against […]

3 Achieving Gender Equality in Sports and Overcoming Discrimination

Introduction Sports Equality. Do girls qualify as athletes? Are female sports considered a sport to all? Mariana De Paula Silva wrote on Athletes Network, “Female athletes have to deal with sexist comments coming especially from men who think these female athletes aren’t strong or talented enough to perform well” (2016). Why should female sports be […]

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4 Gender Equality: The Impact of Gender-Based Violence on Society

Introduction Gender-based violence can be defined as “violence that is directed against a person because of their gender,” according to the European Institute for Gender Equality. The website states that “both women and men experience gender-based violence, but the majority of victims are women and girls.” Forms and Impact of Gender-Based Violence Although it is […]

5 Exploring the Gender Pay Gap: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions

Introduction to the Gender Pay Gap: Understanding its basis and significance Pay inequality in the workplace, or what is also known as the gender pay gap, is generally the comparative measure of looking at the position of a woman in the workforce in terms of what she earns for a particular job. There has been […]

6 Unraveling the Complex Roots of the Gender Pay Gap in Modern Society

In the 1920s, women earned the right to vote. In the 1960s, women entered the workforce. In the 1970s, women had Roe vs. Wade passed. It’s 2017, and yet women still don’t get paid the same amount as men. The gender wage gap is a blatant act of sexism in which women get paid 80 […]

7 Tackling the Gender Pay Gap: A Fight for Equality and Fairness

Currently, female employees make 18% less per hour and 36% less per week than their comparable male colleagues, and, astoundingly, in many companies, there is also a bonus pattern that favors men. This is simply not acceptable. Women have the right to be paid equally to their male colleagues. The fact that there is a […]

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JSmol Viewer

Towards energy equity: understanding and addressing multifaceted energy inequality.

1. Introduction

2. theoretical basis, 3. results of the theoretical background, 4. outcomes of the empirical research, 5. discussion, 6. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Volodzkiene, L.; Streimikiene, D. Towards Energy Equity: Understanding and Addressing Multifaceted Energy Inequality. Energies 2024 , 17 , 4500. https://doi.org/10.3390/en17174500

Volodzkiene L, Streimikiene D. Towards Energy Equity: Understanding and Addressing Multifaceted Energy Inequality. Energies . 2024; 17(17):4500. https://doi.org/10.3390/en17174500

Volodzkiene, Lina, and Dalia Streimikiene. 2024. "Towards Energy Equity: Understanding and Addressing Multifaceted Energy Inequality" Energies 17, no. 17: 4500. https://doi.org/10.3390/en17174500

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