01 Section A, Key question 3 - Class, age and disability identities (part 3)

Social positions and self-identification

A person's position in society and their own sense of identity are related, but they are different things.

Identity is a person's understanding of who they are, including their sense of belonging and how others recognise or classify them. Social position refers to where a person is located in social relationships and categories: for example, their occupational class, their age or their experience of disability. Self-identification is how the person describes and understands themselves. Someone can be classified as a professional worker while continuing to describe themselves as working class because of their upbringing and community ties.

An identity can be ascribed, meaning attributed to someone by other people, rather than chosen by that person. A school may treat an adult learner as a “mature student”; the learner may think of themselves chiefly as a parent or artist. This difference matters because other people's classifications can have consequences even when the individual rejects them. Refusing a class label does not remove differences in resources, and feeling young does not prevent others from applying an age stereotype.

Socialisation is the process through which people learn a society's or group's culture, norms and values. Family stories, friendship groups, school expectations, workplace routines, religious communities and media representations can all offer accounts of who someone is and where they belong. Individuals interpret those messages: they may accept them, resist them or combine them with other experiences. Social influence therefore does not mean that everyone exposed to the same message acquires the same identity.

Consider this original teaching example. A 68-year-old engineer begins retirement but still describes herself as an engineer and participates in a professional association. “Retired” names a change in employment position; her continuing professional identification reflects years of work and ongoing relationships. It would be unjustified to conclude that retirement instantly replaced her whole identity with “old person”.

Class, culture and belonging

Class identity can develop through shared experiences and cultural practices as well as through a person's economic position.

Social class refers to divisions connected with economic resources and relationships, including occupation, ownership, income and wealth. Income is money received over a period; wealth is accumulated assets. The everyday labels “working class” and “middle class” do not have one universally agreed boundary. A researcher classifying occupations is measuring something different from an interviewee choosing a label to express family loyalty or belonging.

Class-related culture can include ways of speaking, leisure interests, attitudes to education, expectations about employment and memories of a neighbourhood or industry. These are possible patterns to investigate, not a checklist for sorting people. Enjoying football does not prove someone is working class, and visiting an art gallery does not prove they are middle class. People share practices across class boundaries, and both classes contain considerable diversity.

Family socialisation can make class belonging meaningful through stories about work, pride in a trade or the experience of managing scarce resources. Peers may reinforce belonging through shared language and local activities. Education and workplaces can introduce different expectations, including new ways of speaking and presenting oneself. Media representations may also attach respectability or stigma to particular accents, occupations and neighbourhoods. A stigma is a socially discrediting label or attribute; it concerns how an audience judges people, rather than a defect in those people.

Pierre Bourdieu's account of cultural capital helps explain why culture and class may be connected. Cultural capital includes acquired knowledge and dispositions, cultural goods, and recognised qualifications that can provide advantages in a particular social setting. Families transmit some of these resources through everyday activity. A school that values a familiar style of discussion may reward pupils already practised in that style. Recognition can help someone feel that they belong, while repeated correction may make another person feel out of place. This is an application of Bourdieu's argument, rather than proof that every school or pupil has the same experience. Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital (1986).

Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst (2001) examined class identities using 178 in-depth interviews conducted in the Manchester area between 1997 and 1999. Participants could recognise class divisions yet hesitate to place themselves in a class; describing oneself as ordinary could be important. This supports distinguishing class awareness from a straightforward personal label. Interviews illuminate meanings, but this regional, historical evidence cannot establish how common those meanings are across Britain today. Original study abstract.

In an original teaching example, a first-generation graduate becomes an accountant and learns the workplace's professional conventions. This may change her occupational position and her sense of competence. She may nevertheless retain a working-class identification through family relationships and pride in her background. Social mobility, movement between social positions, can therefore create continuity, change or tension in class identity; it does not automatically erase an earlier identification.

Age roles and the life course

Age identities develop through socially organised roles and expectations as well as through the passage of time.

Chronological age is the number of years someone has lived. An age identity concerns what it means to the person, and to others, to be considered young, adult, middle-aged or older. Biological development and ageing are real, but they cannot explain every cultural expectation attached to an age. Being judged “too old” for a fashion depends on a social rule about appearance, rather than simply on physical capacity.

An age norm is an expectation about suitable behaviour or roles for people of a particular age. Family members may expect increasing independence as a child grows. Schools organise pupils in year groups and allocate responsibilities by age. Peer groups can develop shared fashions, humour and leisure practices. Workplaces can associate seniority with experience, while media images may associate youth with novelty or older age with dependence. These messages can be accepted or challenged: an older worker may reject being portrayed as unable to learn.

The life course is the sequence of roles, events and transitions through which a person's life develops in its social and historical setting. Leaving school, entering work, becoming a carer or retiring can change everyday relationships and the identities people use. These events do not happen at the same age, in the same order, or to everyone. A student who begins university at 40 encounters different expectations from an 18-year-old student, although both occupy the student role. Learning a new role is an example of socialisation continuing beyond childhood.

An age group also differs from a birth cohort, people born in a similar period. People aged 20 and 70 today have reached those ages in different historical circumstances. If a survey finds different attitudes between them, we cannot assume that growing older alone caused the difference: schooling, technology and major events may have shaped their cohorts differently. Even one cohort includes diverse class backgrounds, communities and personal experiences.

Ageism involves stereotyping, prejudice or discrimination based on age. The World Health Organization's 2021 report recognises that it can occur through institutions, interactions or people's judgements about themselves, and can affect younger as well as older people. Such classifications can narrow the identities people feel able to express. WHO, Global report on ageism.

For example, in an original teaching scenario, a club assumes that older members want only quiet activities. Excluding them from a dance group could reduce opportunities to express an active identity. An older member who organises an inclusive dance session can challenge that classification. This reasoning connects an agency's expectations to participation and self-understanding; it avoids treating every older person as either dependent or exceptionally energetic.

Disability, barriers and culture

Disability identities can be shaped by social barriers, cultural belonging and personal experiences of impairment.

For this sociological discussion, impairment refers to a condition affecting bodily, sensory or mental functioning. The medical model of disability locates the main problem in an individual's condition and directs attention towards diagnosis, treatment or rehabilitation. This can inform help with symptoms, but used alone it can obscure the organisation of an environment and how others treat a person.

The social model of disability directs attention to barriers that exclude people with impairments from participation. UPIAS, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, distinguished physical impairment from disabling social arrangements in its foundational statement (1976). This shifted the question from only “What is wrong with the person?” towards “What prevents participation?” The statement is an activist argument about social organisation, rather than a survey of every disabled person's identity. UPIAS, Fundamental Principles of Disability.

Consider an original teaching example: a wheelchair user wants to attend a community meeting held upstairs without a lift. Restricted access is produced by the combination of the person's mobility requirements and the venue's arrangement. Moving the meeting to an accessible room changes participation without requiring the person to change their body. If other members repeatedly assume the person cannot contribute, their attitudes create another barrier. Inclusion can make it easier to express an identity as a neighbour or organiser instead of being treated solely as a recipient of help.

Family and educational expectations can encourage independence and belonging, or communicate that someone is incapable. Peer relationships can provide shared experience and recognition. Workplace routines and inaccessible communication can classify someone as an outsider. Media representations that frame disabled people only as objects of pity or as heroes can crowd out ordinary identities as friends, parents or workers. These are mechanisms to examine in particular settings, not claims that all agencies always exclude.

Collective identities can also develop through disability-rights groups, shared histories, creative work and campaigns for access. A disability identity may provide solidarity and pride. Culture need not centre on a medical category: the British Deaf Association describes Deaf belonging through language, community and cultural identity, including British Sign Language. This offers a concrete example of a cultural and linguistic identification that a hearing-status classification alone cannot explain. It does not establish that every deaf person identifies in the same way. British Deaf Association, “What we stand for”.

There is no single experience shared uniformly by everyone classed as disabled. Impairments may be visible or not apparent, present from birth or acquired later, and stable or changing. People can identify strongly with a disability community, give another aspect of identity priority, or change how they identify. Shakespeare and Watson's critical discussion argues that a strong social-model account can overlook bodily experiences and the diversity of identities. Removing barriers remains valuable; it need not mean denying pain, fatigue or a person's wish for treatment. Their account is a theoretical critique, not evidence that disabled people all reject collective identity. Shakespeare and Watson, The social model of disability: an outdated ideology?, Leeds archive edition (2002).

Intersecting and changing identities

Class, age and disability can interact so that neither experiences nor identities are explained adequately by one category alone.

Intersection means that aspects of a person's social position and identity operate together in a particular context. It requires explaining a connection, rather than merely listing that someone is older, working class and disabled. For example, the significance of an inaccessible bus service may depend on resources: someone who can afford an alternative journey may keep attending a valued group, while someone unable to afford it may lose regular contact. A barrier and class resources interact to shape the relationships through which belonging is sustained. This original illustration shows a possible mechanism, not an observed comparison or a claim that money removes every barrier.

Age can alter these connections. In another original example, a younger person with an impairment may be treated as incapable of adult independence, while an older person with the same impairment may encounter assumptions that dependence is simply expected. Similar access requirements can therefore be interpreted through different age norms. The individuals may challenge those interpretations and understand themselves quite differently. Gender, ethnicity and other aspects can also intersect with these experiences; no single label exhausts a person.

The relative importance of class, age or disability is therefore an empirical question: it should be investigated rather than decided from the category. At work, a person may emphasise a skilled occupational identity. During an access campaign, shared disability experience may become prominent. At a family celebration, their role as a grandparent may matter most. An identity can have low personal salience while the associated social position still affects opportunities or how others treat them.

Identities can also change when relationships and roles change. Leaving work may reduce daily reinforcement of an occupational identity and create time for a new community role. Acquiring an impairment can bring new encounters with barriers, support networks and classifications; the person may reinterpret their biography or retain earlier identifications. Class mobility can change resources and networks while memories and family commitments remain. Change can be gradual, contested and incomplete, rather than a total replacement of one identity by another.

A sound explanation keeps three questions distinct: what social position a person occupies, how agencies and experiences affect that position's meaning, and how the person identifies. The strength of a structural explanation is that it recognises constraints and available resources. An account focused on interaction and personal meaning shows how people interpret and negotiate those conditions. Using both helps explain why social patterns exist alongside variation within every group.