How Creative Contributions Emerge Over the Lifespan

The starting point for this article is, What are the hegemonic models of man and woman that educational practices are orientated toward in gypsy communities (models that are often in conflict with mainstream schooling institution's models of socialization)? We do not find the collectivism/individualism approach for explaining socialization in minority cultures helpful, for it can lead us to misunderstand the continuous process of change through which communities challenge existing power relations and thereby change society. The alternative proposed here is the analysis of the role of multivoicedness in the process of cultural change, hybridation, and resistance. A set of conversations with members of a Spanish gypsy community give us a “text” where multiple voices contribute, showing a mixed culture where “traditional” voices are in a constant dialogue with “modern” voices. Minority culture cannot be interpreted as a “traditional” culture, for minority culture includes voices of the hegemonic culture in various different forms and provokes hybridation as differentiation, creating a complex framework for children's socialization.     

‘Becoming familiar with a world’: a relational view of socialization

Ethnographic data have frequently been used to examine socialization, but rarely to ground theories of socialization. This paper is an exception. Interest in indigenous representations emerging in situations involving socialization has led to the building of a relational model of socialization, which contrasts with mainstream developmental models of this phenomenon. Socialization is generally defined in terms of cultural learning, the internalization of culture or culture acquisition, that is in terms of the individual's development. The present paper defines it in terms of becoming familiar with a new ‘world’, and a series of changes affecting the structure of the relationship between the human agent and this new world. These structural changes include immersion in a world that is at first strange; subjection to the authority of this world on the basis of acceptance of this authority; and involvement in the world's everyday life structures and activities through doing.     

Spaces for public orientation? Longitudinal effects of Internet use in adolescence

The article departs from an overarching research question: How does young people's engagement in different Internet spaces affect the development of their public orientation during adolescence? It analyses longitudinal panel data in order to explore how young people's public orientation develops during a phase in life (13–20) which is critical for political socialization. Data are derived from three waves of data collection among young people who were 13–17 years old at the time for the first data collection. The concept public orientation is measured by three indicators: young people's values, interests and everyday peer talk. These indicators are analysed with reference to respondents' Internet orientations, which we conceptualize as four separate but inter-related spaces (a news space, a space for social interaction, a game space and a creative space). The results primarily emphasize the importance of orientations towards news space and space for social interaction. Overall, the findings strongly suggest that orientations towards these spaces are related to adolescents' public orientation. The findings confirm the centrality of news and information in political socialization, but they also challenge the idea that social media facilities – such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging – enable forms of social interaction and creative production that have an overall positive impact on young people's public orientation.     

Fashioning Males and Females: Appearance Management and the Social Reproduction of Gender

The author examines the part played by appearance management in both the intergenerational and everyday reproduction of gendered identities in contemporary American society. The author empirically explores the contributions of appearance management to young children's gender socialization by drawing upon observation in preschools, informal interviews with children's parents, as well as others' observations and findings. That analysis indicates that sex-class related appearance management invests infants with gendered identities, promotes children's sex-class related identification of others, and encourages them to embrace behaviorally their own ascribed sex-class identities. Sex-class related appearance management is of fundamental importance to both the intergenerational and interactional reproduction of the seemingly natural and moral order of gendered person that characterizes our society.     

Mother and Child Facial Expression Labeling Skill Relates to Mutual Responsiveness During Emotional Conversations

The capacity to engage with one’s child in a reciprocally responsive way is an important element of successful and rewarding parent–child conversations, which are common contexts for emotion socialization. The degree to which a parent–child dyad shows a mutually responsive orientation presumably depends on both individuals’ socio-emotional skills. For example, one or both members of a dyad needs to be able to accurately interpret and respond to the other’s nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions, to facilitate mutually responsive interactions. Little research, however, has examined whether and how mother and/or child facial expression decoding skill relates to dyads’ emotional mutuality during conversations. We thus examined associations between both mother and child facial expression decoding skill and observed emotional mutuality during parent-preschooler conversations about happy child memories. Results lend support to our hypotheses by suggesting that both mother and child capacities to read others’ emotional cues make distinct contributions to parent–child emotional mutuality in the context of reminiscing conversations. Specifically, mothers’ accurate decoding of child facial expressions predicted maternal displays of positive affect and interest, while children’s accurate decoding of adult facial expressions predicted dyadic displays of mutual enjoyment. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, parent/child facial expression decoding skills did not interact to predict observed mutual responsiveness. These findings underscore the importance of attending to both parent and child contributions to successful dyadic interactions that facilitate effective emotion socialization.     

Literary Nonsense in Daniil Kharms's Incidents

Abstract

Whereas the works of Daniil Kharms have been object of extensive scholarly analysis, little attention has been given to the character of his texts as nonsense literature, which I claim consists of the absence of both a synonym and a homonym for a given text. Such absences are regarded, respectively, as violations of Grice's Maxim of Relevance and Labov's concept of reportability. As a consequence of these violations, the nonsense text conveys information that is not relevant outside of its own boundaries, and this information cannot be effectively conveyed except in the very materialization of the nonsense text. An analysis of 'Vyvalivaiushchiesia starukhi', one of Kharms's Incidents, as a manifestation of literary nonsense will contribute to a better understanding of the concept of nonsense in literature and the significant role that nonsense plays in Kharms's oeuvre.     

Perceptions of gendered-challenges in academia: How women academics see gender hierarchies as barriers to achievement

Despite the egalitarian and collegial philosophy in its ideals, academic market is segregated and gendered where women receive fewer rewards than their male counterparts, are under-represented, segregated and excluded from participation in the formal and informal academic structures in academia. The country contexts, the gendered academic organizational settings as well as everyday interactions all play a major role not only in women's participation within academia, but also how they perceive their future in academic institutions. This research note, through an original survey with over 200 academics, attempts to study the latter assumption by looking at women academics' perceptions of their work life, their challenges, as well as aspirations. Our results show that those perceiving strong hierarchy in the realm of work are significantly more likely to believe that being woman in academia harms their job prospects. We also show that, not only were they pessimistic about the challenges facing them at the moment, but they were also more skeptical about women's potential in overcoming such challenges in the future.     

Suicide and Homo Duplex an Interpretation of Durkheim's Typology of Suicide*

The four types of suicide that Durkheim distinguished are implicit in his concept of homo duplex and the view of socialization this entailed. The individual requires both repression of his passions and direction toward society; too much or too little of either of these two processes leads to suicide and each of the four types represents one type of such failure in socialization. Internal evidence from Suiciae is used to show that Durkheim did in fact derive the suicide typology from his view of man. From the standpoint of this interpretation, those by Parsons and Douglas and by commentators who equate the anomic and egoistic suicide types are reviewed and their misunderstandings noted. Finally, the interpretation given is used to shed light on other aspects of Durkheim's thought, especially some that are disputed in the secondary literature.     

Teachers' Goals and Role Behavior*

A survey in junior and senior high schools assessed the goal orientations of 316 teachers. These goals are factor analyzed and produce a two-factor structure, each composed of four items. Teachers are rated as low, medium or high on each factor, called socialization and academic. Teachers' goals are related to the grading practices and sanctions used in the classroom. A stress on academic goals is positively related with the use of performance criteria in grading students and to the infrequent use of sanctions. A socialization emphasis is positively related to the use of non-performance criteria in grading and the frequent use of sanctions.     

Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizes the World of ‘the Other’

Freshmen in an orientation course at a state university answered questionnaires about their peer mentors' listening and how well their peer mentors help them balance dialectical tensions of socialization. Results showed that perceived directive and emotional listening help the protégé manage these tensions. Perceived emotional listening discriminated between high and low levels of liking and relational closeness but was only a slightly better predictor of reducing the protégé's socialization tensions. Both types of perceived listening responses are important to effective mentoring: emotional listening helps protégés form positive relationships with their mentors and directive listening meets protégés' expectations.     

The Role of the School Social Worker

The aims of our education system are no longer only to impart knowledge on the “3 Rs”. The formal educative process in the school has been slowly broadened and includes not only academic pursuits, but plays a large part in the overall socialization of a child to become a functioning member of society. The school has taken on functions once the prerogative of the family (for example, use of leisure time, vocational guidance, sex and health education) and provides other cultural learning experiences. It has come to be expected of the school that it take responsibility for part of the child's emotional and social development as well as the formal educative aspects of a school's curriculum.¹     

Lay discourses of the rural: Developments and implications for rural studies

Considerations of lay discourses of the rural - people's everyday interpretations of rural places and ideas of the rural - have become increasingly evident in some key articles addressing the theory and practice of academic rural studies. A major element of the retheorization of rural studies, which itself is set within the broader contexts of recent developments in social theory, considerations of lay discourses have concerned themselves with the nature and implications of everyday interpretations and constructions of the rural, and, in some cases, how academic discourses are complexly bound up with such processes. This paper sets out to review some of the key examples of how and why lay discourses are being used in academic approaches to the rural, and how some of these are also addressing the key question of the problematic relationship between lay and academic discourses. It then aims to develop these initiatives, firstly, by suggesting some clarification of what lay discourse is; how other discourses, particularly popular and professional, should be identified; and why close attention should be paid to how they link up. Secondly, drawing on qualitative case study material gathered from an academic incursion into lay discourses of a small village in south west England, it is suggested that the very different nature of lay discourses has not been fully appreciated, and this has led to only partial success in some academic attempts to assimilate them into new approaches to rural studies, particularly in the ongoing debate about definitions of the rural. It is shown that lay discourses of the rural, such as they are, can be expected to be both spatially and conceptually complex and incoherent to an extent that will make it difficult for them to be incorporated into established (modern) academic rural approaches and thus leads to conclusions that in part support Murdoch and Pratt's (1993) concept of the ‘post-rural’.     

Young people’s everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement

Everyday political talk is an important democratic activity. Research on young people has focused on the role of talk in political socialization. The overall question in this study is: What encourages or impedes young people to participate in everyday political talk? Politics has been described as a potentially unsafe topic. The study investigates young people’s own experiences of conversations in families, peer groups, and social media. The study applies a social interactional approach and understands political talk as a social achievement, related to norms and the management of self-identities. It is based on a multimethod approach comprising individual interviews, group interviews, and diaries. The group consists of 23 high school students (aged 17–18). The results show that the engagement in political talk is sensitive to the social settings. Norms make political topics expected or best to avoid. The family and peer groups are potentially important context for friendly talk, argumentations, exploration of opinions, and identities. The participants are in general more reluctant to express opinions in social media. The fear of face-threatening responses is one important aspect. The study suggests that political talk is an activity in which young people express, reveal, and carefully manage political self-identities.     

Economic Development and the Effects of Family Characteristics on Mathematics Achievement

This article explores the relationship between nations' level of economic development and the influence of adolescents' social backgrounds on their academic achievement. Using data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the authors found that the positive effect of higher parents' education on middle‐school students' mathematics test scores is remarkably consistent among the 34 nations examined. In contrast, the relative advantage of living in a traditional family for mathematics achievement varies systematically between nations, being significantly greater in those with stronger economies. Although the influence of socioeconomic status on educational stratification does not appear to change, the deepening academic disadvantage of living with only one natural parent in more developed nations may result from marginalization of families in these societies.     

Ethnic–Racial Socialization in the Family: A Decade's Advance on Precursors and Outcomes

In the current decade, the U.S. population reached historically high levels of ethnic–racial diversity and reelected the nation's first Black–White biracial President. Simultaneously, scholars also documented significant ethnic–racial inequities in education, increased xenophobia, and a racial climate that revealed deep-seated ethnic–racial tensions. Given this backdrop and acknowledging the significant role that families play in youths' abilities to navigate their social contexts, the current review focused on the literature on families' ethnic–racial socialization efforts with youth from the 2010 decade. Our review of 259 empirical articles revealed that there has been an exponential increase in research on family ethnic–racial socialization in this decade. Furthermore, although it is clear that family ethnic–racial socialization is a robust predictor of youths' adjustment, the associations between socialization and adjustment must be considered with attention to specific socialization strategies, the confluence of strategies used, and the unique contexts within which families' lives are embedded.     

Parenting Styles: The Impact on Student Achievement

ABSTRACT

Parenting style and its impact on student achievement in a multidimensional society continues to pose significant challenges to clinicians, researchers, educators, and parents alike. This literature review summarizes the research surrounding five domains: (1) parental control; (2) gender and parenting style; (3) parental education; (4) perceptual differences between parents and their children; and (5) ethnicity and diversity. Behavioral control and psychological control were found to be two inherent features of parental style that have a direct affect on student achievement. Adolescents' perceived level of independence when interacting with their parents also seemed to have a direct relationship on their academic achievement. Research concerning children's progress in mathematics as related to parenting style and gender stereotype was also uncovered. Evidence was found to support the notion that parental education can have an indirect impact on children's academic achievement in various cultures. Implications for future research are identified including the need for applied research in learning communities factoring in variables for family structure, expectations, ethnicity, communication, and involvement.     

Parents Differentiate Between Their Personal Values and Their Socialization Values: The Role of Adolescents' Values

This study focuses on the differentiation process, involving the emergence of a distinction between parents' own personal values and their socialization values (the values they want their children to adopt), and on the contribution of children's values to their parents' socialization values. Measures of personal and socialization values were administrated to 603 Israeli adolescents and their parents. As we hypothesized, parents differentiate between their personal values and their socialization values. Moreover, adolescents' values had a specific contribution to their parents' socialization values. These findings provide new support to the notion that the socialization process should be considered as the result of the interaction between parents and their adolescent children rather than as a unidirectional process affected by parents alone.     

Trapped in Space? Children's Accounts of Risky Environments

The purpose of this article is to explore children's perceptions and experiences of safety and risk in one highly contested interface area in Belfast. Interface areas are landscapes divided by physical and symbolic boundaries on the basis of religious/ethno‐national identification. The research draws on maps and focus group discussions with young teenagers from four schools in an interface area located in North Belfast. The teenagers identified both private and public places of risk that they faced in their everyday lives. The types of risks produced by this environment are outlined and the teenagers’ strategies for managing the daily risks that they faced in their everyday lives are assessed. The data reveal how teenagers negotiate movement across different types of space and illustrate the extent to which their immediate geographical environment is dependent on its location within wider political, social and cultural systems.     

Agents of Religious Socialization Among American Jews*

This study analyzes the process of religious socialization among American Jews using a sample of Chicago area adults. Two studies of Catholic schooling by Andrew Greeley and co-authors provides a conceptual framework. In addition to religious schooling, parental religiosity and spouse's religiosity analyzed in the Catholic school studies, this paper considers the effects of peer influences, youth group participation, and summer camping. An explanatory (path) model of religious socialization is developed. The findings indicate that four agents of religious socialization are consistently the best predictors of all types of adult religious involvement. They rank differently, however, in their predictive power. Contrary to many previous studies, these data show that parental influences tend to be more indirect than direct, mainly performing a channeling function; religious schooling has both substantial direct and indirect effects; and adult experiences are often more important than childhood experiences in the socialization process.     

A population-based inquiry of homeless episode characteristics and early educational well-being

Child homelessness and educational well-being is an area of national research that requires more precise investigation to address mixed findings. The aim of this study was to extend the investigation of the relations between homelessness and educational well-being by determining if timing and frequency of homeless episodes are differentially associated with children's academic and classroom engagement outcomes. This investigation used a comprehensive research model to study the effects of these homeless episode characteristics within a large urban student cohort. Additionally, this study accounted for co-occurring early risk factors. Findings indicated that having a first homeless episode in early childhood was associated with non-proficiency in mathematics and academic engagement problems. Also more frequent homeless episodes were related to truancy in third grade. These results stress the importance of early intervention for homeless children and underscore the need to further understand the variation in young children's homeless experiences.