Another reason discussions about social class are difficult is that most U.S. citizens consider themselves "middle class" (Rose, 1986), and the lines between classes are exceedingly blurred. While economists or sociologists may distinguish between groups of people based on income levels or occupation type, these distinctions do not correlate readily to common ideas of social class. For example, the incomes of small business owners and skilled blue- collar workers may range from vary low to quite high, and family income may range from low to high depending on whether there are one or two earners. Therefore, is it income, type of occupation, family makeup or how one was raised that determines class status? Furthermore, there is good evidence that the "middle class" as defined by income is shrinking. In fact, current projections indicate that downward mobility will be much more common in the future, that many sons and daughters of middle and working-class families will have lower incomes than their parents achieved.
Class Categories
In spite of these difficulties, I use the following class categories in this discussion: upper, middle, working, and poor. Use of these categories indicates recognition that U.S. society is characterized by different socioeconomic levels or classes, distinguishable based on their members' access to power, status, and money, as well as by how their members live and relate to the means of production. The upper class is made up of people and families who own and control corporations, banks, and other institutions that have power over goods and services. The middle and working classes are made up of families whose members sell their labor power or the products thereof. There is also a class of very poor people who find it difficult or impossible to sell their labor power. This class is disproportionatley filled with people with disabilities, single mothers, elderly people, and people of color. These categories are used because they have meaning to most people and because they reflect the major distinctions having to do with occupational and income status in the U.S.
Human Services and Family Class Position
Human service organizations, including those serving people with disabilities, reflect middle-class expectations about how people should behave and how people should behave and how people should be treated, and their practices are based upon middle-class assumptions about the families and individuals they serve. For examples, while studies have shown that middle, working class, and poor people typically hold the same basic values, differences have been found in child-rearing patterns, community participation, clothing, hairstyles, foods, speech patterns and pronuciation, body language, styles of homes, furnishings, numbers of people visible in the neighborhood, daily routines, music preferences, leisure- time preferences, amount of community involvement, and involvement with extended family (Kerbo, 1983).
How class-based differences are perceived by human service organizations can have major and lasting effects on people's lives. For example, a middle class human service worker, hearing speech patterns and pronunciations that he or she has learned to associate with a lack of education or ability, may suspect that the person speaking lacks the capacity to raise children, work, or fill other valued societal roles. At the very least, the middle-class worker must recognize and overcome his or her societally induced presumption that people who speak differently are inferior. At worst, the worker's unconscious prejudices can result in an unwarranted use of power over the person with a disability or his parents and a punitive withholding of support for the person or family member in social roles such as parent, worker, tenant, homeowner, or friend.
Human service organizations and their workers also tend to promote values that may conflict with the values of particular families. For example, agencies have traditionally emphasized both conformity to the rules of the organization and achievement of "independence," a state in which a person or family is self-reliant in carrying out the tasks involved in daily living. Many organizations today are promoting interdependence rather than independence and consumer control of services.
Any of these emphasis, though, are likely to be perceived and practiced differently by people raised in middle class, working class, and poor families, and to create misunderstandings between human service workers and the families with whom they interact. Human service organizations, therefore, must be open to different ways of interpreting and responding to the values they promote, and must learn to recognize potential class biases in their expectations of people.
Poverty and Disability
Finally, there is strong evidence that poverty causes and exacerbates disability. According to Krause and Stoddard (1989), the link between "activity limitation" (a Census bureau term that is broader than disability) and family income is clear. Over one fourth of the people in families whose annual income (in 1986 dollars) was under $10,000 have activity limitations. Many of these families have adult members with disabilities, who if unemployed are likely to have no other income than a small monthly benefit through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Income (SSDI). Children in low-income households also have significantly higher proportions of limitations than those in higher income families. Low-income families may have difficulty just obtaining food and shelter for their children, and rarely have the toys, clothing, medical care, and other resources that middle-income families view as necessities for their children with or without disabilities.
Also, because people belonging to racial minority groups are much more likely to be poor, there are many ways in which race, culture and class issues overlap. Some examples include labelling practices (poor and nonwhite children are more likely to be diagnoses as having certain disabilities) and the activation of human service agency control mechanisms (e.g. removal of children from the home, judgments about a family's willingness to cooperate or benefit from services, and others). Very often, especially when these other differences exist, a family's perspective about what is really needed by the family is overridden or reframed by agency workers. This can and does occur in the name of support, with little or no awareness by workers that their own middle-class standards are operating against families.
Conclusion
As with gender and culture, awareness of class issues should encourage human service workers and the system they represent to accept and understand the differences in families. Services offered to poor or working-class families, more than to middle- class families, may need to address the family's concerns about issues that have little to do with the disability of a family member. These concerns might include income support, medical care, assistance with housing, utility bills, or food, and other issues that affect the whole family and its ability to nurture a member with a disability. Services that are not flexible enough to address these needs are not likely to make positive differences in these families' lives, and may in fact cause harm to families.