Social Psychology:
Sociological Perspectives
David E. Rohall
Melissa A. Milkie
Jeffrey W. Lucas
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Social Psychology:
Sociological Perspectives
Chapter 6: Socialization over the
Life Course
The Concept of Socialization
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Socialization refers to the ways in which
individuals attempt to align their own
thoughts, feelings, and behavior to fit into
society or groups
Socialization is the process in which
individuals incorporate society into their
senses of self
Socialization also occurs in group contexts
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: Developing the Self
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: Stages of Self Development
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There are three stages of self
development:
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Preparatory stage
Play stage
Game stage
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: The Role of the Other
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: The Sociology of Childhood
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: Children’s Culture
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: Children’s Cultural Routines
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Corsaro (2005) defined children’s
cultural routines as stable sets of
activities, objects, and values that children
produce and share in during interaction
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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: Interpretive Reproductions
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Children mold specific roles to meet the
needs of the peer groups in three ways:
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SI: Learning Racism
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The subtle nature of children’s play can
help us understand the roots of the
replication of racist attitudes and behaviors
Ausdale and Feagin’s (2002) research
shows that racist thoughts and beliefs can
be brought into children’s interaction at a
very young age
Children integrate prejudice into their
interactions to meet the needs of those
interactions
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Structural Dimensions of
Socialization
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: The Life Course
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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:
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Historical context
Timing
Linked lives
Agency
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Historical Context
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The first theme in the life course 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
People from different cohorts experience
different life events at crucial moments of
their lives
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Examples of Historical Events by
Cohort
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Social Timing
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Linked Lives
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Agency
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The last theme in life course sociology is
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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Agents of Socialization
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Sociologists generally view agents of
socialization as mediators of the larger
society
Families may affect child development
directly through their parenting techniques,
for instance, but those techniques often
reflect larger cultural patterns
Three primary agents of socialization
include families, schools, and peers
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Family
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Families are considered the first or primary
agent of socialization because most
children are raised from infancy to
adulthood with parents and siblings
Family structures have changed in the
U.S. over the last 30 years with more
single-parent households
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Class, Race, and Gender in
Families
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Socialization processes and outcomes are
different among social classes:
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: School Contexts
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: The Pygmalion Effect
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Peer Culture
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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 children to
understand children’s hierarchies, showing
that children form into friendship cliques
where they spent most of their time:
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Popular clique
Wannabes
Middle friendship groups
Social isolates
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
SSP: Peer-Group Socialization
Processes
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Gecas argued that peer-group
socialization includes three areas of child
development:
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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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
GP: Group Processes and Socialization
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Group processes research emphasizes
the ways that social statuses impact
interactions in groups
Status characteristics theory incorporates
socialization processes through
referential beliefs, beliefs held in common
by people about the relationships between
status characteristics and reward levels
Referential beliefs are taught to us in
society
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
GP: Assessing the Effects of
Socialization
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Group processes experiments focus on
the consequences of socialization
Michael Lovaglia and his colleagues
(1998), for instance, found that subjects
deemed as “high-status” in a group
experiment scored significantly higher on a
IQ test than did participants defined as
“low-status”
The difference they found was almost as
large as the average difference in scores
between Whites and African Americans
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007
Chapter 6: Bringing It All Together
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Sociologists examine the role of society in
our personal development
Interactionists focus on how children learn
to relate by adapting 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
Copyright (c) Allyn Bacon 2007