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Refractive Errors, Intelligence and Social Mobility
Author(s) -
JAHODA GUSTAV
Publication year - 1962
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1962.tb00689.x
Subject(s) - conformity , hypermetropia , psychology , refractive error , dimension (graph theory) , optometry , developmental psychology , social psychology , medicine , mathematics , ophthalmology , eye disease , pure mathematics
Existing evidence concerning the relationship between refractive error and intelligence, and the determinants of the former, is reviewed. This leads to the expectation that myopia and hypermetropia entail some tendency towards upward and downward social mobility respectively. Two hypotheses were framed accordingly, and tested with samples of ametropic school‐children and normal controls. The associations between type of refractive error, test performance and parental occupation were in conformity with the predicted patterns and highly significant. A tentative model is suggested which takes account of the time dimension in the mobility process, and the potential implications of the findings emerging from this exploratory investigation are discussed.