rohall 3e ppt ch06

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Social PsychologySociological Perspectives

THIRD EDITIONRohall, Milkie, Lucas

Chapter Six

Socialization over the Life Course


The Concept of Socialization

• Socialization is the process by which individuals acquire thoughts, feelings, and behaviors “appropriate” to their positions in society

• Socialization also occurs in group contexts


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


SI: Stages of Self Development

• There are three stages of self development:– Preparatory stage - The preparatory stage provides

the cognitive information necessary for children to act out other people’s roles.

– Play stage - At the play stage , children begin to use language to make believe as they play others’ roles.

– Game stage - The game stage occurs when children are capable of managing several different roles at the same time.


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


SI: Learning Race, Class and Gender• Racial socialization refers to learning about one’s

ethnic and racial identity in a given culture– 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

• Gender socialization refers to the learning of expectations about how to behave related to one’s gender– Research shows that gender socialization begins even

before children are born, as parents attribute gender characteristics to their children


SI: Learning Race, Class and Gender

• Americans are also cognizant of class identities– Polls regularly find that most Americans define

themselves as middle class, even though many of them would fit into the rich or working classes

• Learning the culture of different classes involves the learning of mannerisms and dress; this includes things like tastes in music or art– These constructed ways of living both reflect our class

position to other people and also confirm that identity to ourselves


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


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


SI: Children’s Cultural Routines

• Children’s cultural routines are 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


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


SSP: Structural Dimensionsof 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– Life events are any experiences that cause

significant change in the course of our lives– Agents of socialization are groups that are most

influential in the process of teaching children the norms and values of a culture


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 and social context – Timing – Linked lives– Agency


SSP: Historical Context

• 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 – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y etc.

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


SSP: Examples of Historical Eventsby Cohort


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


SSP: 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


Figure 6.1 Narcissist Personality Index (NPI) Scores by Generation.


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


SSP: Human Agency

• The last theme in life course sociology is human 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


SSP: Agents of Socialization

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

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

• Other agents of socialization include the media, which is becoming one of the most important agents across all ages, classes and races.


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

• Families may affect child development directly through their parenting techniques, for instance, but those techniques often reflect larger cultural patterns

• Family structures have changed in the U.S. over the last 30 years with more single-parent households


Figure 6.2 Changes in U.S. Household Composition, 1970 and 2000.


SSP: Class Differences among 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


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


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


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-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


• Popular clique – includes children with active social lives and the largest number of friends

• Wannabes – represent children that want to be popular but do not quite get accepted into this group

• Middle friendship circles – this group forms smaller circles of friends and is less hierarchical

• Social Isolates – this group has trouble establishing any relationships with kids in the other cliques

• Peer hierarchies are important to children and adolescents as they utilize them to decide how to act.

SSP: Peer Culture


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

• Peer groups provide knowledge unique to a given age group or generation. In other words, parental norms may not be appropriate for same-aged peer groups.


SSP: 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

• Watching people on television may provide role models for our own behavior


GP: Group Processes and Socialization

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

• Status characteristics theory defines referential beliefs as beliefs held in common by people about the relationships between status characteristics and reward levels

• Referential beliefs are taught to us in society


GP: Assessing the Effectsof Socialization

• Group processes experiments have the capcity to explain the consequences of socialization processes

• 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”

• The socialization of prejudice may create conditions under which lower expectations yield lower performance


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 adopting 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

rohall 3e ppt ch06

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