On the Temporality of Status Perceptions and Anxieties

To date, research on status perceptions and anxieties has varied widely in terms of the concepts involved and the instruments used. This poses a challenge, not least in terms of comparability. The inconsistency of approaches is already evident in the variety of terms used to study the phenomenon, such as (status) anxieties, worries, concerns, fears, deprivations, etc. This is certainly also due to the fact that the field involves several disciplines, especially social psychology and sociology. A systematic account of how status perceptions and anxieties are measured and what this means for empirical findings is largely lacking. Rather, the field seems to be only vaguely structured on the basis of respective understandings of status. We therefore propose a new systematization of status perceptions, conceptualized in terms of a temporal logic, while at the same time differentiating along different status dimensions. We assume that perceptions of one's status (and any associated anxieties) either refer to the present (where do I stand currently), are oriented towards the past (what have I gained or lost), or project into the future (what can I achieve, what threatens me), and that different empirical patterns are predominant in each case. Methodologically, we show that the temporality of status perceptions can be precisely identified in the semantics of the numerous indicators used in the field. Furthermore, using data from a large panel data set, we test our assumption of temporality with factor analyses and examine its different effects with regression analyses based on right-wing populist attitudes. We find that different empirical patterns emerge depending on the temporal logic of status perceptions. The proposed systematization should help the field resolve ambiguities and increase compatibility with research on other topics, such as the social construction of time and the future.