Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives David E. Rohall Melissa A. Milkie Jeffrey W. Lucas This multimedia product and its contents are protected under copyright law. The following are prohibited by law: ● any public performance or display, including transmission of any image of a network; ● preparation of any derivative work, including the extraction, in whole or in part, of any images; ● any rental, lease, or lending of the program

Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives Chapter 6: Socialization over the Life Course

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: Stages of Self Development  There are three stages of self development: Preparatory stage Play stage Game stage

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: 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 during interaction  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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SI: Learning Racism  The subtle nature of children’s play can help us understand the roots of the replication of racist attitudes and behaviors  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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: Historical Context  The first theme in the life course 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: Examples of Historical Events by Cohort

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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 children to understand children’s hierarchies, showing that children form into friendship cliques where they spent most of their time: Popular clique Wannabes Middle friendship groups Social isolates

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 SSP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 GP: 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

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 GP: 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 a IQ test than did participants defined as “low-status”  The difference they found was almost as large as the average difference in scores between Whites and African Americans

Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007 Chapter 6: Bringing It All Together  Sociologists examine the role of society in our personal development  Interactionists focus on how children learn to relate by adapting adult roles and practicing them during socialization  The social structure and personality perspective emphasizes life course sociology and agents of socialization  Group processes scholars focus on the effects of socialization in group processes