Grandparenting in Chinese Immigrant Families

In light of the life course perspective, this semistructured interview study with 29 grandparents involved in the caregiving of their grandchildren in Chinese immigrant families revealed three major themes: intergenerational connectedness and continuity of cultural practices, role varieties and responsibilities, and adjustment and adaptation. Despite immigration, Chinese grandparents continued the tradition of providing care to grandchildren. Although the grandparent role entailed responsibilities and there were adjustments to make when living in the new place, overall, grandparents considered their caregiving experiences positive. Support to these grandparents, however, was needed at both family and community levels to ensure their stay in the United States and their continuous contribution to their adult children's lives.     

Revisiting age identity: A research note

Using data from 666 Midwesterners, we reexamine the issue of age identity. We consider five dimensions of age identity—subjective age, others' view of one's age, desired age, desired longevity, and perceived old age. We find that people believe that others think they are the age they feel rather than their actual age. Findings also suggest that “old age” is thought to begin in the mid-seventies. Finally, although subjective age increases as people age, it is not a one-to-one correspondence. Rather people feel relatively younger than their age as they get older.     

Gendered experiences in midlife: Implications for age identity

Prior work reports that women maintain younger identities than men; however, few studies have explored factors that may produce gendered self-perceptions of age. Drawing on several theoretical streams, including perspectives on the self (e.g., situational identity, the self-enhancement principle, role-identities, and social identity) and the life course (e.g., linked lives), this study examines how gendered experiences in the domains of family, work, and health are related to gender differences in age identity. Data are drawn from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (n=2681). The results indicate that, compared with men, women have significantly worse health, lower levels of perceived control over their marriages/partnerships, a lesser likelihood of employment, and a greater likelihood of having older partners, all of which are associated with older identities. Controlling for these factors, women report significantly more youthful identities than men. The findings also suggest that, rather than acting as markers of one's age status, family and work roles influence age identity through the patterning of demands that individuals face and the sense of control they have over their lives.     

Adolescent and family development: Autonomy and identity in the digital age

Adolescence is a time when youth are faced with multiple tasks that intersect and influence one another, e.g., increased desire for autonomy, salience of identity issues, peer orientation, self-focus and self-consciousness, and a continuing need for a safe environment in which to explore autonomy and identity. These all occur in a dynamic ecosystemic environment, which in the past would have mostly included family, peers, and school, but today also includes cyberspace as both a system, and a means to interact with many other systems through the use of multiple forms of information technology (IT). This paper uses the voices and experiences of 128 adolescents, captured in qualitative interviews, to look at autonomy and identity in the digital age as they talk about their parents vis à vis their use of IT. Thematic analysis revealed two major themes: 1) Adolescents spoke of their expertise. In particular they commented on their knowledge to repair equipment, ability to use IT well, their sense of pride in their own ability and their parents' acknowledgement of this ability. 2) Subjects perceived little need for their own supervision, but assessed that other adolescents and younger children needed to be watched closely by their parents. Implications of this work are discussed.     

Changes in age identity: Self perceptions in middle and late life

Sixty-seven women and 34 men, aged 41 to 96, ranging from blue collar workers to professionals, were interviewed about changes that led to their feeling older, and to note special events or birthdays that held particular significance. Four themes were used in the analysis to describe the ways respondents perceived their own aging: the comparative self, reflected self, retrospective self, and mature self. The resulting framework, relying heavily on symbolic interactionist theory, was useful for the entire age range of six decades, despite the fact that age identity is usually studied over attenuated age ranges.     

Grandparenting across borders: American grandparents and their Israeli grandchildren in a transnational reality

Families are increasingly dispersed across national borders. Americans in Israel are one migrant group that represents the worldwide phenomenon of transnationalism. Grandparents separated geographically from their grandchildren develop new means of communication with them and new kinds of relationships. This study uses ethnographic interviews with the grandparents of transnational, American-Israeli children and youth to offer an in-depth examination of the experience of grandparenting across borders. We find that grandparenting children who are both geographically distant and raised in a foreign culture necessitates the development of new ways of maintaining relationships with grandchildren. This study considers the impact of transnational migration on the extended family, on those left behind, who struggle with redefining their roles as grandparents and with the sense of being deprived of the roles they had expected to play.     

Experiences of Grandparenting Disabled Children in the UK: A Qualitative Study of Intergenerational Relationships

Contemporary patterns of family, work, and welfare make the experience of grandparenting complex and diverse. This UK-based qualitative study aimed to explore grandparenting in the context of childhood disability. Nine grandparents (aged 59–79 years) with disabled and non-disabled grandchildren took part in semi-structured interviews. Grandparents provided extensive instrumental and emotional care and support and sought a balance between involvement versus interfering. Grandparents actively drew on life experiences to engage with services to maximize support. Contemplating the future, grandparents had concerns for adult children as well as grandchildren. Developing policies to support grandparents of disabled grandchildren are urgently required.     

Aging and identity politics

In this essay, I reflect on multiple identities—woman, lesbian, old—as they interconnect at different life stages. I raise an issue of identity politics (Is “old” as fundamental an identity as “woman”?) and suggest that critical gerontology offers a lens through which to interpret my personal journey from a core feminist identity to a questioning and ambivalent identity as an old woman.     

Situation and ethnic identity

This paper illustrates situational variation as regards ethnic identification and develops some ideas about identity formation and the expression of ethnic identity in multiple ethnic contexts. The author discusses both social (ethnic) identity and subjective social identity (self-identifications). The author shows how expressions of ethnic origin and identification vary with changes in a number of hypothetical situational settings, explained in terms of a combination of the present and the past. The material consists of interview data from 110 Turks and 114 Yugoslavs aged 16-24, selected randomly, in Stockholm, Sweden. The 1st interview question asked of the Turks and Yugoslavs is how they would describe where they came from in several hypothetical situations. Answers vary more by place asked than by person asking. A tendency exists to relate oneself positively to the person asking, by stressing commonalities. The 2nd question was "To whom do you think you most strongly belong?" Answers show that these immigrants primarily relate themselves to their own ethnic groups and to Swedes, while other immigrant groups in Sweden are less important. The final question was "How would you feel if someone here in Sweden told you that you seem to be just like other Swedes?" The most usual answer is that it does not matter. Both Turks and Yugoslavs would appreciate the statements more from a Swede than a compatriot, and the Turks would become more angry than the Yugoslavs if a compatriot said it. Turks have preserved more ethnic and traditional lifestyles, lack close ties to the Swedes, and experience greater social distance to Swedes. Migrants often develop complex multiple identities, and situational variation, at least in part, can be understood as a competence for living with and making use of this complexity. The article concludes with a typology that illustrates how the interplay between the past and the present creates more or less complex patterns of identification, so that a person cannot express more than parts of his or her identifications in a given concrete situation.     

Soil, blood and identity

Modern nations are products of nationalism, and can be defined only as such, rather than by their own distinctive traits - which anyway vary over an extremely wide range. Nationalism was, sociologically, an attempt made by the modern elites to recapture the allegiance (in the form of cultural hegemony) of the ‘masses’ produced by the early modern transformations and particularly by the cultural rupture between the elites and the rest of the population by the ‘civilizing process’, whose substance was the self-constitution and the self-separation of new elites legitimizing their status by reference to superior culture and knowledge. In the same way in which the modern state needed nationalism for the ‘primitive accumulation’ of authority, nationalism needed coercive powers of the state to promote the postulated dissolution of communal identities in the uniform identity of the nation. In the practice of both, there was an unallayed tension between the ‘inclusivist’ and ‘exclusivists’ prongs of the nation-state project; hence the never fully effaced link between nationalism and racism, nationalism being the racism of the intellectuals, and racism - the nationalism of the masses. Currently our part of the world undergoes the process of the separation between state and nation, effected by lesser reliance of state power on culturalist legitimation and a degree of de-territorialization of communal affiliations, which fills the efforts of nation-building, invention of heritage, tribal integration etc. with a new urgency and may lead to the sharpening of either of the two prongs of the nationalist project.     

Introduction: Globalisation and identity

Abstract

This paper examines the identities of early leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) at a time when British influences still prevailed in South Africa. African attitudes to the “British World” reveal complex identities that also reflected political and cultural variations according to race, class and region. Relations between ANC leaders and the African “elite” and between the elite and subaltern strata were not straightforward. A careful reading of the discourses in and around Congress points to contradictory attitudes to things British and to ambiguous identities that lingered and contributed to the mix of social and national ideas and identities that influence contemporary South Africa.     

Neoliberalism and social work identity

This article considers the relationship between the identity of social work and the neoliberal political project. Reference is made to a small but carefully structured quantitative research study in Auckland, New Zealand which examined the knowledge applied and produced in the practice of social work. This study found evidence consistent with Philp’s [(1979). Notes on the form of knowledge in social work. Sociological Review, 27(1), 83–111] theorisation of a specific ‘form of knowledge’ for social work which is produced and reproduced as a function of relational engagement between social workers and those who are constructed as ‘clients’ in an unequal society. This discourse casts the ‘failing subject’ as socially located and inherently redeemable in direct contrast to populist neoliberal constructions of personal responsibility and moral deficit. With reference to dialectical theory it is suggested that this resilient discourse, embedded in ‘every-day’ practice, is inevitably a source of resistance to the imposition of neoliberal practice and policy design. This resistance provides hope for the progressive voice of social work in the current contest of ideas in relation to the future development of social work.     

Biracial identity and social marginality

This comparative analysis of classic and recent literature explores the developmental and social implications of biracial identity in the U.S. Though specific attention was given to Black-White biracial persons, a broader analysis yielded some surprising insights into the nature and implications of the biracial personality and the accompanying differences in interpersonal styles and social relationships.Dr. Brown is in private practice.     

Social comparison,group identity and professional identity. A study with bank clerks

Abstract

This study consisted of analyzing several hypotheses derived from Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) within a real-life situation. We identified the intergroup relations among three banks in Brazil as an ideal chance to test the salience hypothesis (Oakes & Turner, 1980; Doise & Sinclair, 1973) and also the relationship between discrimination and social identity (Brown et al. 1983b). In general, results did not support the hypotheses, and alternative explanations of results, in terms of the groups ' real life conditions, are discussed.     

The identity curation game: digital inequality,identity work,and emotion management

ABSTRACT

The research examines an understudied facet of digital inequality: how digital inequality impacts identity work and emotion management. The analysis reveals how unequal access to digital resources shapes how well youths are able to play what I call the identity curation game. Digital resources determine youths’ ability to succeed in this game that is governed by three implicit rules: (1) constantly update or be sidelined, (2) engage in constant reciprocated identity-affirming interactions, and (3) maintain a strategy of vigilance to remove traces of failed identity performances. This article draws on Symbolic Interactionism and pays particular attention to Hochschild’s theory of emotion management. Drawing on these frameworks, the findings reveal how under-resourced youths experience connectivity gaps that disrupt their ability to play the identity curation game, as well as the resulting emotional consequences. Under-resourced youths manage distinctive negative emotions arising from connectivity gaps that hinder their digital identity work, as well as engaging in distinct kinds of suppressive work to police their own emotions including longing, envy, shame, frustration, and stigmatization. In making these linkages, the research reveals the cascading effects of digital inequality among youths where constant connectivity is the sine qua non of social inclusion.