“I don’t see anything positive or neutral in it” – Adolescents’ Understandings and Perceptions of Inequality

It is now an established stylized fact that public perceptions of inequality – whether in income, wealth, or upward social mobility – are often inaccurate and biased. Yet many empirical studies on this subject typically presuppose a scientific conceptualisation of inequality. As a complement, we study how scientific conceptualisations translates into everyday understandings and perceptions of economic inequality. We focus on adolescents aged 16 to 18 in Germany, a particularly interesting group for at least two reasons. First, egalitarian positions are known to be particularly prevalent among younger people (Almås et al. 2010; 2024; Barreiro et al. 2019; Flanagan and Kornbluh 2019). It is therefore plausible that adolescents’ approaches to inequality are strongly shaped by normative assumptions and moral judgments. Second, everyday interactions at school should be more socioeconomically heterogeneous than, for example, those at the workplace, which could result in more accurate (i.e., aligned with objective inequality) perceptions of inequality.
Methodologically, we conduct qualitative surveys (inspired by Irwin 2018; Knell and Stix 2020) and focus group discussions at a German high school (Gymnasium). The combination of the two data collection methods allows an examination of adolescents’ individual concepts of inequality and corresponding structures of justification, as well as argumentative negotiation processes. We employ qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz and Rädiker 2024): Applying a deductive–inductive coding procedure, we initiate the analysis with a set of deductive codes including, first and foremost, the four distributional axioms that are satisfied by standard measures of inequality to map a descriptive, scientific understanding of inequality onto adolescents’ everyday conceptualizations.
Preliminary findings[1] suggest that adolescents discuss inequality in terms of ratios, distributions, and relative differences, i.e., the scientific concepts and measures of inequality appear at least not counterintuitive to our participants. Yet, participants’ perceptions extend beyond that and are embedded in lived experiences. Hence, we find important differences from a scientific understanding: (a) a focus on salient groups within the distribution, and (b) a strong connection between inequality and injustice, which extant surveys often do not capture due to their questions’ framing. Overall, our study sheds light on whether, when, and how adolescents merely describe inequality or already judging it as unjust.
[1] Disclaimer: Data collection is still undergoing. So far, four focus groups with a total of 30 participants have been conducted. At least four additional focus groups are planned to reach theoretical saturation. By the time of the conference, final results will be available.