Topic 1 - Primary Socialisation

Parsons

• Believes nature clearly plays a part in determining our gender roles.

• Argued women are more suited to expressive roles - those emphasising caring and emotions.

• Men - instrumental roles - require qualities of competition, aggression.

• Implies that men are more suited to paid employment, women to domesticity.

Murray and Hernstein

• Argue form a New Right perspective.

• Argued that some people are born with a predisposition to aggression, argumentativeness and low IQ so can’t foresee consequences.

• Argue these people are more likely to commit crime if they are not socialised into acceptable behaviour.

• See nature as influencing whether a person turns to crime but do agree that nurture can play a part in reducing this likelihood.

Feral children

• Children raised in the wild or in prolonged isolation from human company.

• May seem stupid, unresponsive, animal-like.

• Deprived of the stimulation of human company, these children are barely recognisable as “human”.

• Demonstrates the importance of nurture.

Simpson

• Demonstrated that norms differ depending on place.

• Gay men described “de-gaying” their identity in “heterospaces”.

• Yet dressed and behaved more flamboyantly in safe “homospaces” such as gay bars.

• So, what was considered normal behaviour differed depending on the situation.

Sharpe

• Found that young women in 1970s valued marriage, love, and children.

• By the 1990s their values had changed to prioritise careers, money and travel.

• Norms are clearly not innate but are constructed through socialisation and our environments.

Ghuman

• Found that British Asian parents tend to have slightly different values to most white parents.

• Children are taught to value respect for elders, and loyalty to the family more highly than the average white British child might.

Oakley

• Studied the construction of gender roles.

• Boys watched their fathers, girls their mothers.

• Manipulation - encouraging behaviour that is seen as stereotypically acceptable for the child’s gender.

• Canalisation - the way in which parents channel children’s interests into toys and activities that are seen as “normal for that sex”.

Gillies

• Middle class parents use a range of resources to support their children, focusing on social skills and education.

• Children were given positive sanctions such as treatments if they did well at school - reinforced the idea that education is important.

• Working class parents provided their children with strategies to cope with poverty, low social status and vulnerability to physical abuse, violence.

• Provided emotional strength.

Murray

• Argues that single parent families are “inadequate socialisers” because they do not have two role models.

• Lack of a father figure is destructive for children as women can’t discipline their children as well as men.

• Teenage girls deliberately get pregnant to obtain state benefits or council flats

• Murray argues that these groups become “welfare dependent”” relying on government benefits as their sole source of income.