sociology

9/10 family & culture

shifts in family life in the US today

  • decline in married adults

  • marriage at a later age

  • a rise in divorce

  • growth in cohabitation

  • growth in marriage among same-gender couples

  • increases in non-marital childbearing

marriage

aspirations for marriage remain high - 74% of high school seniors in 1976 expected to marry at some point, compared with 79% in 2014

decline in married adults

  • 70% of adults lived with a spouse in 19

divorce

divorce rates have been high since the late 1970s

  • 46% of women's marriages ended in divorce in 2010

  • divorce rate among younger adults has declined since 1990 but not declined for older americans

cohabitation

  • the proportion of adults lving together ahs increased sicne the 1960s

  • more children are born to unmarried cohabititing partners

fertility

declined precipitously after the baby boom through the early 70s

increased from the mid-1990s to 2007

declined since 2007

key component is that hispanic immigration decreased leading to decreased fertility rate

same gender unions

in 1970 12% of children lived in single parent families compared to 27% of children in 2018

families v households

biological kin have become less likely to reside in the same household


family as a social institution

Chodorow (1989): the family as a place where reciprocal typification between parents and children takes place

Stacey (2011): What is considered the family is a historically and culturally situated

  • in every society family is a way of navigating a tension between eros (romantic/sexual/intimate life) and domesticity

what is the family

people who consider themselves family - emohasizing emotional bonds and chosen and lived relationships

A group created through kinship - socially recognized relationships that connect people to one another—creates expectations of identity, obligation, and behavior


stacey’s research on the mosuo people

tisese/ walking marriage:


9/15 education as a social institution

education & life chances

  • College is a pathway for economic opportunity. But students enter with different experiences, resources, and preparation

  • Occupations requiring a bachelor's degree have a higher median annual wage

  • Educational attainment is strongly linked to occupation

  • less than half of us adults have a bachelors degree

  • 94% of students who had parents w/ bachelors degree or higher attended college, 60% of students with parents who didnt have a degree attended college

the american dream

  • society is fundamentally open

  • children have equal life chances

  • individuals carve out their life paths thru hard work effort and talent

  • Differences in outcomes are because of individual effort and initiative

  • individuals are responsible for the outcomes they achieve.


wealth

richest 10% of families own

  • nearly 80% of real estate outside family homes

  • 90% of stocks and bonds

  • 60% of money in bank accounts



child poverty

  • 1 in 5 live below the poverty line

  • the rate for black children is twice as high

  • poverty rates r higher in the us when compared western european countries



unequal labor market

decline in good jobs with high wages, benefits, retirement, advancement opprotuinities

growth in bad jobs with low wages, no benefits


education as a social institution

  • Schools do more than teach academic knowledge

  • They organize students' daily lives and shape interactions between children, teachers, and institutions

concerted cultivation: intentional effort to grow certain attributes and knowledge and give their children opportunities

accomplishment of natural growth: working class parents focus on meeting their children's basic needs


habitus

concerted cultivation > entitlement

accomplishment of natural growth> a sense of constraint


HABITUS: the ways we think feel and act are developed through everyday social expierences

  • dispositions develop thru repeated experiences in the family, schools, and other social institutions

  • how we interpret situations and respond to them often without consciously thinking about it


Bourdieu on inequality

the power of individuals to define what constitutes a highly valued activity

reasons why particular social practices are valued more highly than others

strategies individuals use to maintain or improve their social position


9/17 education, family + class

class

  • material access: access to economic resources (jobs, income, housing, education, wealth/capital)

  • structural position: economic resources are unevenly distributed within society and people have different levels of access

  • social identity: how people understand themselves and others

  • social relationship: class differences are produced through interactions and institutions


unequal material position is reproduced over generations in pargt because of systemic forces and


capital= the resources someone possesses and can draw on to confront institutional arrangements in the social world

  • economic capital: what u have

  • cultural capital: knowledge and skills

  • symbolic capital: who you know


field: instituinal arrangment in which people act and interact each with its own rules and valued form of capital


habitus: a sense of what is comfortable to us shaped by our different social locations and the socialiaziation that happens there

  • internalized dispositions

  • perceptions

  • ways of acting/thinking


  • the resources parents possess which allow them to provide particular opportunities and expierences for their children - ex of economic capital

  • parents have different knowledges and practices which are valued differently by institutions (knowledge of how schools work, parents ability to interven/negotiate/advocate, ways of speaking and interacting). middle class parenting is more likely to be rewarded as legitimate by schools.


bourdieu

this is all related to power and how those in power shape what is valued


legitimation: the privileges are not seen for as they are but rather percieved as being earned by individual ntelligence, talent, status, knowledge




bettie (2000)

class performance: class as something that is performed and accomplished and isnt just material location

class isnt a biological fact its a socially created structure


cultural capital

  • ways of speaking

  • clothing/appearance

  • cultural preferences and styles

  • ways of interacting with authority

  • educational expierences

schools assign different values to these resources and their expression


the performance of class is shaped and shapes racial/ethnic and gender emaning