Social class and approaches to shaping educational expectations

Scholars have recognized young people's educational expectations as a key factor in predicting educational outcomes, but few studies have attempted a comprehensive classification of how young people's educational expectations are shaped. In this article, I outline a typology of how young people from different social class origins shape their educational expectations. Drawing on 100 interviews with 15-year-olds, I find two underlying dimensions in young people's accounts of their educational expectations: how risk aware they are and how goal oriented they are. These dimensions translate into a heuristic model for understanding the structure of young people's educational expectations. I identify four major approaches to shaping educational expectations - the confident, the determined, the explorative, and the anxious - and show how these approaches connect to the young people's class origin. The typology of approaches offers a conceptual framework for understanding the mechanisms that lead young people to shape their expectations in qualitatively different ways.     

Mothers' Differentiation and Depressive Symptoms Among Adult Children

Parents' differentiation has been linked to negative psychological and behavioral outcomes in children, adolescents, and young adults. This line of research, however, has not been extended to families in later life. In this article, we use data from 671 mother‐child dyads in 275 families in the greater Boston area to explore whether mothers' differentiation among their children is related to psychological well‐being among offspring. We examined actual and perceived maternal differentiation in the domains of closeness, expectations for care, and conflict. We hypothesized that depressive symptoms would be higher when mothers differentiated among their children and when adult children perceived differentiation. Although the specific patterns varied somewhat by mothers' and children's reports, the findings indicated that, across all 3 domains, maternal differentiation was related to higher depression scores.     

Young Women's Life Stories and Accounts of Parental Divorce

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of an analysis of 7 young women's life story accounts of the experience of parental separation during adolescence. The young women took part in the Life Stories and Family Transitions Study conducted in New Zealand. The qualitative methodology used in this study allowed for an investigation of the ways that participants made sense of their experiences of parental separation within the life story. The narratives of parental separation were extracted from the interviews and analyzed for form and content. The analysis of form found that the stories progressed through a number of stages, titled “The Early Years,” “The Deteriorating Parental Relationship,” “The Climax,” and “The Aftermath.” A number of themes emerged from a process of interpretive thematic analysis. These themes were often associated with different stages of the story of separation, and were titled “Putting Together the Pieces,” “The Struggling Self,” and “Self-Determination and Competency.” As participants put together the stories of separation, they considered their parents' perspectives and integrated these with their own experiences of family events, developing their own personal theories. The stories of struggle, and of personal strength and self-determination, emerge from the analysis.     

How Does Juvenile Offending Relate to Mothers' Aspirations and Expectations for Their Sons?

Mothers of 317 first‐time juvenile offenders (M = 15.35 years old) were interviewed over 2.5 years about their expectations and aspirations for their sons' futures. Mothers' expectations were lower than their aspirations, reflecting a discrepancy between what mothers felt was important for their child's future and what they considered likely to happen. As their children continued to engage in delinquent acts, mothers' expectations for their sons' future success diminished. Youth age moderated the association between delinquency and maternal expectations, such that when perceived delinquency was high, expectations were lower for mothers of young sons compared to mothers of older sons. These findings carry implications for practice and intervention, as parent expectations and aspirations are both directly and indirectly associated with youth achievement.     

Connections with banking institutions and diverse asset portfolios in young adulthood: Children as potential future investors

A central hypothesis of Child Development Accounts (CDA) suggests that savings accounts in childhood lay a foundation for connecting to mainstream banking institutions and diversifying asset portfolios in young adulthood and beyond. While children may have limited savings to invest initially, they are financial actors who may increasingly invest money into different types of savings products over time. This paper uses propensity score weighted, longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its supplements to examine the types of financial and nonfinancial assets owned by young adults and whether or not they are more likely to own these assets when they have savings accounts as children. The most commonly owned assets in young adulthood included savings accounts (89%), vehicles (54%) and credit cards (51%). Smaller percentages owned stocks (9%), bonds (6%), and homes (8%). On average, young adults owned two to three different assets. Having savings accounts in childhood was associated with being two times more likely to own savings accounts, two times more likely to own credit cards, and four times more likely to own stocks in young adulthood, compared to not having savings accounts in childhood. Young adults' ownership of more total financial assets was also associated with having savings accounts in childhood. Findings provide some supporting evidence of demand for children's savings accounts. Policy endeavors that remove barriers to account ownership may be advantageous for children and mainstream banks.     

Letters

Abstract

Approximately 500,000 children were institutionalised in Australian orphanages and other forms of children's Homes over the course of the 20th century. However, growing up in care is not just a part of childhood; it can have ongoing impact across a person's life. Access to records can be a very important way in which people who grew up in institutional care construct the story of their lives, contributing to their self-identity, and also find out practical information, such as their exact date of birth and medical history. The present article takes as its starting point a recommendation of the third of the Australian Government reports concerned with the institutionalisation of Australian children—Forgotten Australians—and draws on interviews with former residents of children's Homes aged between 42 and 76 years to examine their access to records in Australia. We discuss a case study, the unique Heritage Information Service at MacKillop Family Services, which supports former residents to access their records, and consider the implications for good practice of agencies working in this area.     

The Diagnostic/Therapeutic Preabortion Interview

Abstract

This paper discusses the therapeutic and diagnostic aspects of the preabortion interview, giving attention to those specifics which will help identify students with the greatest likelihood for psychological sequelae and for repeat abortions. The circumstances of the pregnancy change what should be a “normative life crisis” in a planned pregnancy into an acute emotionally and physically intrusive crisis when it is unwanted. The openness of sexually active partners on today's campuses, along with liberalized abortion laws, have generated a sharply increased demand for abortions, and a significant population of young college women seek help from their Student Health Services. Rising expectations for care require optimal coordination of Gynecology and Mental Health Clinics.     

Storytelling,organizations, and the coherent self: The chronotope of childhood in professional life histories

Professional life histories and organizational stories rarely follow the model of beginnings, middles, and ends. Most interviews end up being subjected to what Boje (2008. Storytelling organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage) refers to as the spiral of story disorder. However, some storytelling strategies are often used by interviewees to produce a coherent projection of the self and convey a unified professional ethos. This is the role the time and space of childhood – the childhood chronotope – plays in professional life histories. Childhood is often used by storytellers to bring coherence to their organizational stories – and this is no truer than in the context of interviews. Based on interviews from museum directors, this article illustrates how the childhood chronotope might be a meaningful notion for narrative analysis in organizational studies: childhood is mobilized and reinvested by the individual's self-construction in order to produce a sense of coherence and control over his or her organizational experience and professional self.     

Situational political socialization: a normative approach to young people's adoption and acquisition of political preferences and skills

Research on young people's political socialization has had an adult-centered top–down bias in which young people are considered incomplete and in need of the right upbringing. The article attempts to balance this bias. The aim is to introduce and argue for another normative approach – situational political socialization. Four theoretical elements constitute its basis: (1) the political, (2) contingency (the principle of the public sphere), (3) space and place, and (4) situation. In the contingent western digital media society marked by cultural dissemination, individualism, and the erosion of traditional institutions, situational political socialization represents a normative basis for a research approach which is open, action-oriented and contextualized, viewing young people as political actors in their own right.     

Telling the Story of Stepfamily Beginnings: The Relationship between Young-adult Stepchildren's Stepfamily Origin Stories and their Satisfaction with the Stepfamily

The current study adopts a narrative perspective in examining the content of 80 stepchildren's stepfamily origin stories. Results reveal five types of stepfamily origin stories: Sudden, Dark-sided, Ambivalent, Idealized, and Incremental. Results support the hypothesis that story type would predict differences in family satisfaction; stepchildren who described their stepfamily origins as Idealized were more satisfied than those whose origins were Dark-sided or Sudden. Overall, participants framed their stepfamily identity more positively when their stepfamily beginnings were characterized by closeness, friendship, and even expected ups and downs, rather than when they were left out of the process of negotiating or forming the stepfamily and when the beginnings were tainted by issues they considered to be dark. Stepparents or practitioners may benefit from these findings by examining the means by which stepparents may involve stepchildren in the process of stepfamily courtship, facilitate closeness, and set up realistic expectations for negotiating stepfamily life.     

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies,and the performativity of the arts

ABSTRACT

The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.     

Influence of Expectations for Parental Support on Intergenerational Coresidence Behavior

Abstract

Using the 1988 and 1992 waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), this study examines whether the expectation of support by young adults is widely held and if such a belief predicts if young adults will at some point live with their parents before their final launch. At issue is whether or not the increase in young adults in the parental home represents a normative shift in the expectations that children have of their parents or perhaps is indicative of some other process. The findings suggest that expectation of support does in fact predict living at home but only 31% of the respondents felt that parents were obligated to let their adult children live with them. Findings are placed within a broader context of how shifts in age at first marriage and educational attainment influence young adults' transitions out of the home.     

Adolescent Transitions to Young Adulthood: Antecedents,Correlates, and Consequences of Adolescent Employment

The antecedents, correlates, and consequences of adolescent employment were investigated in a sample of 251 low‐income, African American youth that were followed since birth. The youth (age: M at preschool = 4.89, SD= .70; M at adolescence = 16.44, SD= .66; M at transition to adulthood = 19.36, SD= .76; and M at early adulthood = 27.67, SD= .75) were the firstborn children of African American teenage mothers who gave birth in Baltimore in the 1960s. Analyses examined the antecedents and correlates of age of entry into employment and stability of employment during adolescence. The associations of adolescent work experiences with subsequent adult education and employment outcomes also were considered. Findings indicate that among this sample of low‐income, African American youth, those who repeated a grade in school during middle childhood were more likely to enter the workforce at later ages than their peers who did not repeat a grade. The small subset of adolescents who never worked (n= 12) appear to be markedly more disadvantaged than their peers who worked. At the transition to adulthood, adolescents who entered the workforce earlier were more likely to complete high school than their peers. In addition, stable employment during the adolescent years had more beneficial effects on young men's chances of attending college than young women's postsecondary education. This pattern of findings is consistent with ethnographic accounts of adolescent employment among poor, minority, urban youth.     

Agency as vulnerability: accounting for children's movement to the streets of Accra

This paper considers the agency of children moving to the streets of Accra, Ghana's capital city. A much used but largely unexamined concept, agency is nevertheless commonly deployed in childhood studies as a means to stress the capacity of children to choose to do things. In the literature on street and working children, and a cognate area of study concerned with children's independent migration, this has involved accounts of children's agency made meaningful by reference to theories of rational choice or to the normative force of childhood. It is our argument that both approaches leave unanswered important questions and to counter these omissions we draw upon the arguments of social realists and, in particular, the stress they place on vulnerability as the basis for human agency. We develop this argument further by reference to our research with street children. By drawing upon the children's accounts of leaving their households and heading for Accra's streets, it is our contention that these children do frame their departures as matters of individual choice and self‐determination, and that in doing so they speak of a considerable capacity for action. Nevertheless, a deeper reading of their testimonies also points to the children's understandings of their own vulnerability. By examining what we see as their inability to be dependent upon family and kin, we stress the importance of the children's perceptions of their vulnerability, frailty and need as the basis for a fuller understanding of their agency in leaving their households.     

Garfinkel before ethnomethodology

A short story titled “‘Color Trouble’” by Harold Garfinkel was published inOpportunity in 1940,The Best Short Stories 1941, andPrimer for White Folks in 1945. Garfinkel wrote this short story before World War II while a research fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill under Howard W. Odum, the founder ofSocial Forces “‘Color Trouble’” narrates poignantly the racial victimization of a young black woman traveling on a public bus through the State of Virginia. The short story provides sociologists with a different medium through which to examine the seminal interests of ethnomethodology’s founder. In a literary form, the short story depicts such ethnomethodological concepts as the breaching experiment, the “et cetera clause,” “ad hocing,” and the status degradation ceremony. Garfinkel’s “‘Color Trouble’” also suggests the way in which ethnomethodology overlaps with, as well as diverges from, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective. He received his doctoral degree from the graduate program in sociology at York University, Toronto, Ontario. His article “Autonomy and Responsibility in Social Theory” will appear inCurrent Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 10.     

Race scholarship “with,by, and for” children: How critical youth studies can inform research on race

Children's perspectives on race and their own racialized experiences are often overlooked in traditional social scientific race scholarship. From psychological and child development studies of racial identity formation, to social psychological survey research on children's racial attitudes, to sociological research conducted on children in order to quantify racially disproportionate child outcomes, the unique perspectives of young people are often marginalized. I explore some of the key themes in existing sociological and psychological research involving race and young people and demonstrate the important contributions of this expansive body of scholarship but also highlight limitations. I argue that when it comes specifically to the sociological study of young people and race, much can be learned from an emerging field known as “critical youth studies.” Further, I argue that more research on race that, as Kate Telleczek (2014, p. 16) describes, is “with, by, and for” young people, grounded in the epistemological and methodological tenants of critical youth studies, can lead to new sociological understandings of race and childhood, serve to inform public policies and practices intended to improve children's lives, and provide a platform for young people to express their own concerns and ideas about the racialized society in which they live.     

Young and Older Caregivers at Homeless Animal and Human Shelters: Selfish and Selfless Motives in Helping Others

In the present study, young (n = 34) and older(n = 70) adult volunteers at either animal (n= 48) or human (n = 56) homeless shelters were asked to complete measures of caregiver stress/satisfaction, volunteer motives, and social desirability. Young compared to older volunteers assisting animals, but not humans, reported a significantly higher caseload and spending significantly more time per visit with their clients. In addition, young volunteers reported significantly higher levels of caregiver stress with humans more than animals. Also, volunteers at human (but not animal) homeless shelters claimed the need for meeting social expectations as a motive for community service. Furthermore, younger compared to older volunteers reported gaining relevant career experience, obtaining a knowledge of the plight of others, relieving aversive emotions, and meeting normative expectations as significant motives for volunteering. These results may have important implications for recruitment and training of community volunteers at homeless shelters.     

Are Children Protected in the Family Court? A Perspective from Western Australia

Despite a landmark High Court judgement in the area of child sexual abuse allegations (M and M, 1988), a major concern in such cases seems to be the fear that mothers use false accusations against fathers as ‘weapons’ in custody and contact cases. This paper seeks to examine the validity of such views as they apply to Western Australia. In particular, it examines the belief that false accusations are rampant; the questionable nature of ‘parental alienation syndrome’, the belief that young children's accounts of abuse lack credibility, and the ignoring of the effect of abuse itself on the nature of a child's testimony. The paper argues that the principle of ‘protection of the child's best interests’ should not necessarily be equated with the child having access, even supervised access, with a parent previously accused of having abused the child.