Socioeconomic inequality and adjustments in children’s perceptions of their agency as they age in South Korea

This paper explores how children's perceptions of their agency, as something that is closely associated with its exercise, appear in relation to social structural factors, especially their socioeconomic positions, as they age. Using data from 862 10–18 years old in South Korea, we examine how children's expressed optimism about their ability to achieve their occupational choices can conceal the impact of structural factors on their ‘choices’ and dispositions for (non‐)action over time. Based on the findings, we argue for a more careful interpretation of children's sense of agency that recognises its propensity to continuously adjust in contexts of structural inequality.     

Situating Children's Voices: Considering the Context When Conducting Research with Young Children

I problematise my own concept of children's voices in research by reflecting on certain practices in a study that I conducted in a kindergarten classroom in a city in Saudi Arabia. I examine the cultural and social contexts of my research by drawing on my experience of obtaining children's assent or dissent, my assumptions regarding the possibility of reducing power differentials, and finally, my understanding of the ways children voice their feelings and views. I conclude that voices manifest themselves in multiple ways that extend beyond visual or verbal media. Voices are constructed socially and are shaped culturally to reflect norms regarding how individuals should express their views and feelings within a particular setting and time.     

Space and place in an Urban Landscape: Learning from children's views of their social worlds

In this paper, I examine photos made by children as one part of a three‐year, ethnographic study of childhoods in different communities in California. Within this study, the children's photographs—and their talk about these and other images—illuminate distinctions between the urban spaces that outsiders might notice from particular urban places meaningful to children themselves. These images and commentaries reveal some of the ways in which the children's urban experiences are shaped by social class, gender, ethnicity, immigration, and racialization. They also confirm the importance of social relationships for the meanings that children attach to the urban landscapes in which they live.     

Reconstructing developmental psychology—some first steps

My starting point is the claim that developmental psychology has traditionally projected a standardised image of childhood, especially through the emphasis on describing universal stages of psychological growth within what are assumed to be normal childhood environments. These reifications of universality and normality have in turn regulated social action at individual, family and school level. Increasingly, these same images are being idealised and treated as a standard for judging the quality of childhood in contexts far removed from their Euro-American origins. I explore the historical roots of universalistic thinking about children's nature, their needs and what constitutes healthy development and consider the opportunities for a new psychology of childhood to be reconstructed in ways that pay more attention to the cultural dimensions of the subject. I illustrate the growing interest amongst psychologists in studying children's development as a socio-cultural process, as well as the lessons of social constructionist critiques of the developmental paradigm itself. I conclude by reflecting on some of the challenges facing psychological studies of childhood issues that are more reflexive, inclusive and cultural. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Kind of Mother Am I? Impression Management and the Social Construction of Motherhood

Previous research has examined the use of others as props for impression management (e.g., presidents' use of first ladies), but has left many areas underexplored, including the role of nonadults as important associates. This article focuses on the unacknowledged role of children's appearances in the maintenance of identities and management of impressions for their mothers. Using both participant observation of a playgroup and interviews with mothers of young children, the research described here investigates what these mothers think about children's clothing, mothers' concerns about when—and with whom—to manage impressions, and the impressions these women hope they portray through the physical appearance of their children. In addition to providing insight about these phenomena, the article also discusses responses surrounding the importance of first impressions, differences in meanings attached to children's spoiled appearances, and the sacrifices made in motherhood. Results show that women do use well‐dressed and groomed children to enact and confirm identities as “good mothers” and to protect and enhance their own self‐concepts during the course of everyday social interaction.     

IMPLICATIONS OF INTERNET TECHNOLOGY FOR MEDICAL SOCIOLOGY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

This research examines how parental heterosexism—negative attitudes toward homosexuals and homosexuality—and other family characteristics relate to the development of children's attitudes toward people with HIV/AIDS (PWA). Attention is directed to the overall relationship between parents’ and children's attitudes and to the potential mechanisms through which these linkages are manifested. Based on social learning theories of childhood socialization, a range of mechanisms is considered, focusing on heterosexist attitudes in parents and communication with children about AIDS. Findings indicate that parental attitudes concerning homosexuals influence children's attitudes toward PWA, implying that there can be negative as well as positive consequences of parents’ beliefs on children's attitudes. The possibility of negative parental effects on children's prejudices toward PWA suggests that in-school HIV/AIDS education at younger ages is more important than previously thought.     

“Don't Cry,You're Not a Baby!”: Emotion,Role and Hierarchy in Korean Language Socialisation Practice

I examine how South Korean children learn culturally specific emotional knowledge, especially affective hierarchy and the association between emotional displays and social roles, through participation in peer talk. An analysis of children's and teachers’ everyday emotional discourses shows that children, rather than passively adopting adult emotional discourses, creatively employ a range of linguistic and communicative features regarding emotions to construct their own culture‐laden emotional world. Findings articulate the role children's peer talk has in cultural reproduction and dynamic aspects of the language socialisation processes.     

Parents' hopes and expectations for their children's future occupations

Qualitative research has generated important insights into the intersection of social class, parental values and children's experiences of education and their role in the reproduction of inequalities. There has been less analytic engagement with parents' expectations and aspirations regarding their children's future occupations. Such expectations and aspirations have attracted much research and policy interest. Typically, analyses have been quantitative and focused on outcomes for children. Whilst parental expectations are deemed very influential for children's future occupational outcomes, there is relatively little evidence on the shaping of such expectations, or the ways in which future work and occupations are discussed between parents and children. This article reports on an analysis of parents' ideas about their children's future occupations and the contexts in which these ideas accrue meaning. Drawing on primary data from interviews with parents we explore diversity within, as well as across, social classes. First we explore parents' expectations and aspirations for their children's future occupations. Secondly we consider how parents see their own role in shaping such futures. The evidence highlights the salience of parents' own biographies and class backgrounds in shaping their orientations to, and manner of engagement with, their children's futures. Thirdly we briefly explore how parents' expectations and engagement with their children play out in class differentiated ways as their children approach early adulthood.     

The Role of School Contexts in Adolescents' Weight‐loss Behaviors and Self‐perceptions of Overweight

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and multilevel modeling, this study investigates the role high school social contexts play in the development of adolescents' weight‐loss behaviors and overweight self‐perceptions. Overall, the results indicate that there is an important association between adolescents' weight‐loss behaviors and self‐perceptions of overweight and the weight‐related context of their school. For example, both adolescent boys and girls are less likely to engage in weight‐loss behaviors when overweight is prevalent among their same‐sex schoolmates. However, gender differences are also found. For example, while adolescent boys' self‐perceptions of overweight are significantly associated with their same‐sex schoolmates' characteristics and behaviors, this is not the case for adolescent girls. Overall, these findings suggest that meso‐level social contexts—such as schools—may be particularly important to how individuals incorporate macro‐level beliefs or values—such as gendered body ideals—into their own behaviors and self‐concepts.     

Standpoint theory and middle-range theorizing in International Sociology

This paper responds to Julian Go's Lecture “Thinking against Empire. Anti-colonial Thought and Social Theory.” It proceeds in two parts: I first follow Go's invitation to read and reread Mabel Dove Danquah and Frantz Fanon and explore what their work contributes to our understanding of state-forms. I then examine the terms of Go's invitation more closely. I contrast Go's juxtaposition of imperial sociology on the one hand and anti-colonial sociology on the other hand, with the broader range of theoretical traditions and methods, which a practice-oriented sociology of sociology and an international history of sociology would highlight. I raise the question what “standpoint” adds to the authors Go discusses and the broader range of scholars who have engaged with post-colonial contexts in their research at this point in time. Calling for consideration of the anti-colonial standpoint is a particular choice, which has a distinctive heritage in Hegelian-Marxian projections of the social whole and is in tension with either deep exploration of particular thinkers or the middle-range theorizing that Go also seems to endorse. Defined at a level of abstraction that is “above” (or underneath) actual conversations in a range of fields and subfields, it can appear as a “test” for scholars who have long engaged with post-colonial contexts, which can have unintended consequences when coupled with the institutional power and asymmetric insularity of Anglo-American academia.     

Analyzing Children's Learning and Development in Everyday Settings from a Cultural-Historical Wholeness Approach

The main point in this article is to conceptualise how demands connected to children's life conditions influence both children and caregivers. To pursue this aim I advocate an extension of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of children's learning and development. Vygotsky pursued a wholeness approach to children's development with his concept of “the child's social situation of development” as the child's dialectic experiential and motivational relation with his or her surrounding. This conception I extend with the concepts of institutional practice and activity setting. The conditions for children's activities are the institutional practice and its activity settings. But a child's activities in these settings also has to be seen from the child's perspective, that is, his or her motive orientation. To focus on the child's motive within an activity setting—requires the researcher to focus on the child's social situation of development to discern how the dialectic between the child's orientation within an activity setting and the demands from the setting and other persons influence the child's activities within the child's zone of proximal development.     

Migrant Children,Social Capital and Access to Services Post‐Migration: Transitions,Negotiations and Complex Agencies

For migrant children, moving to a new country is marked by excitement, anxiety and practical challenges in managing this significant transition. This paper draws upon the concepts of social capital and social networks to examine migrant children's access to services post‐migration. Using data from a qualitative study with Eastern European families in Scotland, we identify a range of cumulative barriers that limit children's access to services and illustrate how their experiences are shaped by ethnicity, social class and place. The study shows that migrant children are often disadvantaged post‐migration and develop their own mechanisms to mitigate the impact of migration on their lives. We argue that migrant children's own social networks are relevant and they need to be analysed through a more individualised approach.     

‘No,living well does not mean being rich’: Diverse understandings of well-being among 11–13-year-old children in three Ethiopian communities

Participatory research into how people living in material poverty define and experience well-being and ill-being is increasingly common in developed and developing countries. Such research highlights the importance of experiential aspects, such as being respected and able to preserve one's dignity, and having meaningful choices. Nevertheless, these findings rarely cover children's experiences and are often not contextualized or triangulated with other data. The paper will extend this exploration using data from qualitative research with a sub-sample of children aged 11–13 in three urban and rural communities, drawn from Young Lives, a long-term international research project investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty in four countries, including Ethiopia. Firstly, it addresses how understandings of a good life and what is needed to achieve one varies between communities and amongst children of different backgrounds living in those communities; for example, boys and girls and children from richer or poorer households. Secondly, the study examines how one's place in social relationships also contributes to how children perceive and understand what a good life is. The paper confirms the importance of allowing children to take at least a ‘partial role’ in measuring and monitoring their well-being (Ben-Arieh 2005, 575) and provides examples of how this might be done.     

Of Roots and Wings: Letting Go of the College‐Bound Child

This article examines how parents experience the process of “letting go” of their college‐bound children. The focus of our analysis is on how the parents evaluate the meanings of their children's leaving home and adopt strategies to facilitate the process for both themselves and the departing child. Our analysis is based on interviews with thirty sets of parents. The interview materials allowed us to recognize and then parse the paradoxical task faced by parents of fostering “attached individuation” for both themselves and their children. We address four broad and persistent themes that emerged from our conversations with parents. First, we consider how parents manage the range of sometimes‐conflicting emotions generated by the letting go process. Second, we analyze the content of parents' worries as a good unobtrusive measure of how they understand the transition to college as a ritual marker in their children's lives. Third, we show how negotiations about geography—about proper distance from home—in choosing a college reflect efforts to impose a measure of gradualism into the letting go process. Fourth, we report on how parents theorize the impact of a child's departure on family relationships in general.     

Gender and Children's Housework Time in China: Examining Behavior Modeling in Context

Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one's gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children's housework time. Although researchers have identified behavior modeling as a major mechanism of gender role reproduction and characterized gender socialization as a contextually embedded process, few have investigated contextual variation in behavior modeling, particularly in non‐Western developing countries. Analyzing data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010, the author examined the differences in behavior modeling between boys and girls age 10–15 from 2‐parent families (N = 1,903) in rural and urban China. The results revealed distinctive gendered interplays in the way parental housework and employment behavior helps shape children's housework time. This analysis is a crucial illustration of how the distinctive sociocultural contexts of rural and urban China moderate the effects of housework‐behavior modeling on intergenerational gender role socialization.     

The Relationship Between Maternal Education and Children's Academic Outcomes: A Theoretical Framework

The importance of maternal education for children's academic outcomes is widely recognized, and yet the multiple potential mechanisms that explain this relationship are underexplored. The authors integrate theories of human, cultural, and social capital with 2 developmental psychology theories—bioecological theory and developmental niche theory—to draw attention to how maternal education may influence children's academic outcomes through a range of parenting mechanisms, some of which have been largely neglected in research. This framework provides a more complete picture of how maternal education shapes proximal and distal influences on children's academic outcomes and the ways in which these mechanisms interact and reinforce one another across time and context. The implications of this framework for future family research are then discussed.     

Igniting Constructionist Imaginations: Social Constructionism’s Absence and Potential Contribution to Public Sociology

Why have social constructionists remained absent from debates over public sociology? I argue that constructionist scholarship would be particularly amenable to Michael Burawoy’s notion of ‘organic’ public sociology, given the ability of constructionist scholars to orient awareness contexts in order to help engender constructionist imaginations. This approach requires that constructionists take on a different view of the role of the analyst. I also discuss some of the problems Canadian academics have had engaging with the media in their efforts to engage in ‘traditional’ public sociology, as well as what a constructionist public sociology may look like practice. I conclude by addressing potential challenges to a constructionist public sociology within Canada, including reference to sociology’s disciplinary coherence and how we can approach—and what we mean by—‘publics’.     

Children's perspectives on their economic activity—Diversity,motivations and parental awareness

This research investigates how children from an affluent city in the UK exercise agency to construct their economic worlds. A survey (n = 484) showed that children (ages 10 to 14 years) conduct a range of monetary and non‐monetary activities. A second study (n = 83) with diaries, self‐documentation, and parental questionnaires, showed that children's economic activity involves individual and social motivations, occurs in formal and informal contexts, and is often self‐regulated. Parents acknowledge children's monetary activities and neglect non‐monetary activities. The results suggest that children's agency unfolds in diverse economic activities shaped by contextual factors and interactions with peers and parents, thereby supporting a relational view of children's agency.     

Contextualizing subjective well-being of children in different domains: Does higher safety provide higher subjective well-being for child citizens?

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, all children are born with civil, political, social and economic rights. However, children's ability to exercise their citizenship rights and practices depend on which country context they live in. Within the limits of this article we want to explore how children's subjective wellbeing is affected by the level of safety provided within the larger country context by using data collected by the consortium of the International Survey of Children's Well-Being. The question we elaborate is whether there is a relationship between the welfare context and subjective well-being of children with respect to different domains, and whether age and gender play a role. We first cluster welfare contexts with selected indicators from international reports among the selected countries of the Children's World Survey from high to low safety provided for children. Then, by referring to the existing literature, we propose six domains for analyzing children's subjective well-being: Health; Material conditions; Education; Risk and Safety; Relationships, and Self-perception. By analyzing each domain we ask whether there is a linear relation between the levels of safety welfare contexts and the subjective well-being of children in different domains and whether this hypothetical relationship exists after controlling for the age and gender of participants. According to our findings, high and medium welfare contexts provide higher subjective well-being in the domains of ‘material’ and ‘risk and safety’. Girls have lower subjective well-being in the low safety welfare context compared to boys. We also find that in the domains of education and relationship, girls' subjective well-being is higher than boys in every safety welfare contexts. Last but not least we also find that the high safety welfare context has a lower average in the self-perception domain and also there is gender difference, girls compared to boys are less satisfied with themselves.     

Multicultural desires? Parental negotiation of multiculture and difference in choosing secondary schools for their children

This paper considers the ways in which parents talk about choosing secondary schools in three areas of Greater Manchester. It argues that this can be a moment when parents are considering their own attitudes to, and shaping their children's experiences of, multiculture. Multiculture is taken as the everyday experience of living with difference. The paper argues that multiculture needs to be understood as shaped not only by racialized, ethnic or religious difference (as it is commonly understood) but also by other differences which parents may consider important, particularly class and approaches to parenting. We stress the need to examine what parents say about schooling in the context in which they are talking, which is shaped by local areas and the experiences of their children in primary schools. Based on interviews with an ethnically mixed groups of parents from different schools, we show how perceptions of the racialized and class demographics of schools can influence parents' choice of secondary schools. The paper also argues that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which terms such as ‘multicultural’ and ‘mix’ are applied uniformly to very different contexts, be they particular schools or local areas, suggesting there is a paucity of language in Britain when talking about multiculture.