This project examines the impact of social characteristics such as socioeconomic status and race on behaviors and psychological orientations and that are of theoretical interest from the standpoint of social policy. It also addresses the interrelationship between behavioral and psychological variables, with particular attention to the issue of which class of variables exerts causal influence on the other. The findings underscore the importance of location in the social structure in explaining theoretically important behaviors and psychological orientations, and point to actual mutual causation in the relationship between psychological and behavioral variables. For example, an initial negative effect of children on female self-esteem is found to be explainable by differences in socioeconomic prospects - a variable that displays a strong negative relationship with number of children and a strong positive relationship with self-esteem. And in an examination of the social and psychological factors that influence academic performance, evidence of mutual causation is apparent in the relationship between teachers' expectations and students' academic performance.
