Chapter 6: Socialization Over the Life Course

The Concept of Socialization

Socialization refers to the ways in which individuals attempt to align their own thoughts, feelings, and behavior to fit into society or groups

Socialization is the process in which individuals incorporate society into their senses of self

Socialization also occurs in group contexts

Developing the Self

From an interactionist perspective, the self is a symbolic exchange of language and meaning

Although children pick up symbolic acts

within the first few months of life, children need to learn language skills before they can fully develop their senses of self

Stages of Self Development

There are three stages of self development: Preparatory stage Play stage Game stage

The Role of the Other

Other people are essential to the development of our senses of self

Charles Horton Cooley argued that our senses of self are partly a reflection of the sentiments of other people, a concept called the looking-glass self

We also have the ability to understand how the larger society may view us

Each of us have a generalized other, our perceptions of the attitudes of the whole community

The Sociology of Childhood

Recent research in sociology has started to view childhood as a state in life in which competent actors negotiate their social realities in a similar fashion as adults

Childhood is not just a place in which

children learn to be adults but an active place of culture development and change

From this perspective, children have agency, much like adults

Children’s Culture

Norman Denzin (1971, 1977) studied the subtle ways that children interact with one another

He found that even very young children, 8 to 24 months, can participate in a “conversation of gestures,” nonverbal and preverbal ways of indicating meaning to other people

Hence, even at very young ages children begin the same interactional and negotiation processes as their parents

Children’s Cultural Routines

Corsaro (2005) defined children’s cultural routines as stable sets of activities, objects, and values that children produce and share in interaction with each other

Children must also engage in an interpretive reproduction of adult culture, creatively taking on elements of adult culture to meet the needs of their peer group

Interpretive Reproductions

Children mold specific roles to meet the needs of the peer groups in three ways: Children take information from the adult world

to create stable routines Children use language to manipulate adult

models to address specific needs of their peer culture

Children improvise “sociodramatic” play to acquire the dispositions necessary to manage their daily lives

Learning Racism

The subtle nature of children’s play can help us understand the roots of the replication of racist attitudes and behaviors

Van Ausdale and Feagin’s (2002) research shows that racist thoughts and beliefs can be brought into children’s interaction at a very young age

Children integrate prejudice into their

interactions to meet the needs of those interactions

Structural Dimensions of Socialization

Society continues to impact our development throughout our lives

Scholars from the social structure and personality perspective examine the continued impacts of society through life events and agents of socialization

The Life Course

SSP scholars emphasize the life course in the study of the effects of life events and agents of socialization in our lives

The life course is the process of personal change from infancy to late adulthood resulting from personal and societal events

There are four major themes in life-course sociology: Historical context Timing Linked lives Agency

The first theme in life-course sociology examines how historical conditions may effect our socialization

Historical context refers to how historic

events affect development for people in different birth cohorts, a group of people born within the same time period

People from different cohorts experience different life events at crucial moments of their lives

Historical Context

Examples of Historical Eventsby Cohort

Social Timing

The second theme in life-course sociology focuses on the timing of events in our lives

Social timing refers to the incidence, duration, and sequence of roles, and relevant expectations and beliefs based on age

According to the life-course perspective,

life events most affect us when timing is interrupted, turning an event into a turning point in our lives

Life Stages

Life stages refer to patterns of change from infancy to adulthood

Life stages typically include: Childhood Adolescence Adulthood Late life

Life stages vary by society and provide a guide to what we should be doing at any given age

Linked Lives

The third theme in life-course sociology emphasizes the importance of other people in our lives

Linked lives refers to our relationships with other people

Linked lives have implications for access to

varying amounts of resources with which to cope with life events, changing the way we react to them

Agency

The last theme in life course sociology is agency, our ability to make decisions and control our destinies

This concept is important to life-course sociology because individuals are able to act within the constraints imposed by social and historical conditions, leading to myriad possible outcomes

Our life course is not “set in stone” by social conditions

Agents of Socialization

Sociologists generally view agents of socialization as mediators of the larger society

Families may affect child development

directly through their parenting techniques, for instance, but those techniques often reflect larger cultural patterns

Three primary agents of socialization include families, schools, and peers

Family

Families are considered the first or primary agent of socialization because most children are raised from infancy to adulthood with parents and siblings

Family structures have changed in the

U.S. over the last 30 years with more single-parent households

Class, Race, and Gender in Families

Socialization processes and outcomes are different among social classes: Middle-class families stress autonomy and

individual development over conformity Middle-class families are less likely to use

punitive child-rearing practices than their counterparts in the working class

Middle-class children are more likely to value independence later in life than working-class children

School Contexts

Schools are a second major agent of socialization, representing the institution of education

Although technically designed to impart knowledge about many subjects, the classroom is also a place to learn norms of behavior

Compared to families, schools increase

role of peers in socialization process

The Pygmalion Effect

In a classic study by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968), researchers randomly selected a small percentage of the students and told teachers that these were the students who should be expected to “bloom” intellectually over the coming year

They found that those students who were

randomly deemed to be “bloomers” at the beginning of the year showed a greater improvement in their IQ scores than those who had not been labeled, a process called the Pygmalion effect

Peer Culture

Recent research and theory has started to examine how children actively participate in the socialization process

Adler and Adler (1998) conducted an extensive

study of elementary-school children to understand children’s hierarchies, showing that children form into friendship cliques where they spend most of their time: Popular clique Wannabes Middle friendship groups Social isolates

Peer-Group Socialization Processes

Gecas argued that peer-group socialization includes three areas of child development: The development and validation of the self The development of competence in the

presentation of self The acquisition of knowledge not provided by

parents or schools

Socialization and the Media

Other sources of socialization can include television and other electronic media

The content of television (and other media) do show some long-term effects on people’s behavior

Media can also be used to produce pro-social behavior as well

Group Processes and Socialization

Group processes research emphasizes the ways that social statuses impact interactions in groups

Status characteristics theory incorporates socialization processes through referential beliefs, beliefs held in common by people about the relationships between status characteristics and reward levels

Referential beliefs are taught to us in society

Assessing the Effects of Socialization

Group processes experiments focus on the consequences of socialization

Michael Lovaglia and his colleagues (1998), for instance, found that subjects deemed as “high-status” in a group experiment scored significantly higher on an IQ test than did participants defined as “low-status”

Hence, the socialization of prejudice may create conditions under which lower expectations yield lower performance