2.  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

3.  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

4.  There are three stages of self development:
 Preparatory stage
 Play stage
 Game stage

5.  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

6.  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

7.  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

8.  Corsaro (2005) defined children’s cultural
routines as stable sets of activities, objects, and
values that children produce and share in
interaction with each other
 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

9.  Children mold specific roles to meet the needs
of the peer groups in three ways:
 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

10.  The subtle nature of children’s play can help us
understand the roots of the replication of racist
attitudes and behaviors
 Van 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

11.  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

12.  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:
 Historical context
 Timing
 Linked lives
 Agency

13.  The first theme in life-course sociology
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

15.  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

16.  Life stages refer to patterns of change from
infancy to adulthood
 Life stages typically include:
 Childhood
 Adolescence
 Adulthood
 Late life
 Life stages vary by society and provide a guide
to what we should be doing at any given age

17.  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

18.  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

19.  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

20.  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

21.  Socialization processes and outcomes are
different among social classes:
 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

22.  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

23.  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

24.  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-school children to understand children’s
hierarchies, showing that children form into friendship
cliques where they spend most of their time:
 Popular clique
 Wannabes
 Middle friendship groups
 Social isolates

25.  Gecas argued that peer-group socialization
includes three areas of child development:
 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

26.  Other sources of socialization can include
television and other electronic media
 The content of television (and other media) do
show some long-term effects on people’s
behavior
 Media can also be used to produce pro-social
behavior as well

27.  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

28.  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 an
IQ test than did participants defined as “low-status”
 Hence, the socialization of prejudice may create
conditions under which lower expectations yield lower
performance