Qualitative Assessment for Unit 2: Social Structure

Directions:

• The essay is due by the start of class 1 week from today.
• Write your answers and save them in a separate app. 
• Choose TWO questions to answer - one from each #1 and #2 below
• Each question has multiple parts, be sure to: answer all parts, use specific details from your own life experiences, and write with proper grammar and prose.

Essay Prompt:

This unit we have learned about how people are influenced by their social groups.  This process is called socialization and it begins from birth.  The groups that nurture are most powerful within our culture are called agents of socialization.  The agents of socialization that we examined in class are: family, school, friends/peers, and social media.  This assessment will examine the extent to which you can explain:  

1) the sociological concepts/perspective toward these agents, 

2) what sociological research reveals about how these agents influence individuals in our society and 

3) how these concepts and research show up in your own life or in your own authentic examples.

You MUST ANSWER BOTH 1 and 2 below:

1. Choose EITHER Family, School, Peers or Culture,  and answer the questions for it below.  Note that you only have to choose one (either family or media) but there are multiple parts for whichever you choose.  

A. Explain the difference between nature and nurture and how they interact to create/socialize who you are.  Give examples of how you are influenced by nature and then how you are influenced by nurture from whichever group you chose for #1.  

B. Explain some of the research we examined (readings or video) such as Social Time, Kohl's Values Americans Live By, Thrive and how that research might apply specifically to your own life. Explain how your own life/socialization experiences apply to the research that we learned about. What are some specific ways that your experiences are similar to what we learned about the agent of socialization that you chose for #1.

2.  Choose a DIFFERENT group than what you chose for #1 above and

A. Explain some of the research that shows how people are shaped/socialized by that group.  Use specific details from your own experience as an authentic example.  

B. Explain the difference between manifest lessons and latent lessons.  Then share an example of each from your own experiences with this group.  Be sure to include specific details/examples that authentically connect to your own life.

I recommend that you write this essay in four well-developed paragraphs with one paragraph for each: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B.  You will be assessed 15 points for 1 and 2 if your answer was: fully explained, demonstrated a correct understanding, provided authentic examples.

• For any of the three areas above (fully explained, correct, authentic) that is not developed enough, students  will be assessed 1 point off of the total.
• For any of the three areas above (explained, correct, authentic) that is incorrect students will be assessed 2 points off the total.

Moving forward: If you found this unit interesting and/or want to learn more about how individuals develop a sense of self and are shaped by the social groups around them, consider taking SOCL230 Self & Society often taught by Dr. Everitt

2.08 Assessment 2

 

Today is a quantitative assessment.  

The assessment will be posted to Sakai under the Tests/quizzes tab at the start of today's class.

• Bring a digital device to answer the questions.
• Multiple choice assessment (30 questions) includes 5 sections. 
• You must ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS AS YOU GO - no skipping questions
• Be sure to pace yourself - there are readings that may take some time.  Once you begin, you have 75 minutes to complete it.
• Please do not share any answers.
• Don't be too anxious - you can always submit a qualitative assessment.  That assessment will be posted/assigned at our next class.

 When finished with the assessment, please answer this Post-assessment evaluation. 

If you want to submit a qualitative assessment for this unit, see this link.

Meditation: Listen for how far the noise travels

 

When the bell rings, we often don't realize it but the noise resonates out from the bell and travels to your ear.  We cannot tell how far that noise travels - out the window? into the hall? to the rooms next door or above and below us?  This is like the noise we create.  What we do in the world matters.  We are all participants in society.  But often we don't realize or don't see how far our influence goes.  

From Rumi,

Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.

Can you hear the bell ringing even after it stops making noise? How far and how long does it travel?

Traveling Noise, Gratitude and Sociological Mindfulness

Another way to meditate on how far noise travels is through what the NYT's Melissa Kirsch calls a chain of gratitude,

Consider the gratitude journal, in which you write three things each day that you’re grateful for. It’s similar to the gratitude jar: Each time you think of something worth appreciating, you write it on a slip of paper and drop it in, to be read at the end of the year.

I will think of something small — say, this weird little deck of “wisdom cards” that I draw from each morning as a sort of daily fortune cookie. Then I think about how my friend Melanie gave me the deck and how generous and playful she is, and how lucky I am to know her. But I wouldn’t know her if I hadn’t taught creative writing with her in a summer program in the 1990s. I wouldn’t have had that job if my friend Alden hadn’t recommended me for it, and I wouldn’t know Alden if I hadn’t gone to graduate school with her, and I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school without the encouragement of my undergraduate writing professor, and I wouldn’t have taken her class if not for … you get the picture.

It’s almost a game, tracing the present-day gratitude back through all the causes and conditions that gave rise to it. It’s also immensely satisfying, and mystifying — look how many things had to transpire in order to bring this deck of cards into my life. Simple gratitude is focused on a one-to-one relationship: These cards make me happy. Thinking through this circuit of prerequisites amplifies the gratitude, scales it, brings me into contact with the multiple interdependent factors necessary to bring these cards into my life.

2.07 Agents of Socialization: School and Peers/friends

School as a Socialization Agent in the U.S.

School is mandated in the U.S. until age 16 and most students attend until 18.  While enrolled in school, students are there for approximately 8 hours per day for 12 years of their lives. Although it took the quarantine to realize it, schools are, in fact, very influential in many ways more than simply teaching ABCs and 123s.

Brainstorm the functions that schools serve both society and students.  One way to help you think about this is by thinking about the Covid quarantine and all the ways that you or your families were affected by not having normal school.  List as many functions of school as you can. 

Schools are important in many ways to society.  Some of their functions are to teach lessons; the most obvious being to teach reading, writing, math, history and science.  These manifest lessons are explicit ways that schools influence students.  However, schools also influence students in more subtle, implicit ways, or latent lessons. Some of the latent functions that schools provide students include meeting a peer group, socialize and form friendships. Schools teach students patriotism and form values/bonds that transcend the pluralistic social divisions in a diverse country. Schools also create a place for students to explore different interests and possible careers. For some students, schools provide essential services to students' well being such as food and nutrition as well as mental and emotional health support.

What Latent Lessons Schools Teach

Liberal Values?
Schools have been criticized for latently teaching students progressive values. This is an old trope that has been around since at least 1974.   Three sociologists wanted to research if teachers indoctrinated their students with "liberal" values and what values those were.  Brint, Contreras and Matthews (2001) observed elementary school teachers and they coded the messages that teachers relayed to students.  They observed over 1000 interactions between teachers and students.

Google Form for this lesson

1. Individually Take a guess - brainstorm what you think the messages were that teachers relayed to students most frequently?

DO NOT SCROLL FORWARD UNTIL AFTER ANSWERING #2

Sociologists Brint, Contreras and Matthews observed elementary school teachers and they coded the messages that teachers relayed to students. They observed over 1000 interactions between teachers and students.

They found that the most common references that teachers reinforced to students were:

• Be orderly.
• Work hard.
• Show respect and consideration.
• Participate.
• Be in charge of yourself.
• Cooperate.
• Justice/fairness.
• Responsibility.
• Self-control.

2.  How many of these did you guess in #2? List the messages that you guessed in #2 that were the same as those above.

3. Now, using the list above, decide what % each of those references were out of 100%.  (The total should add up to 100.)

[ANSWER #3 and 4 BEFORE MOVING FORWARD]

Here are the actual totals:

4.  Are you surprised by the actual amount of latent messages that teachers are relaying to their students? Why or why not?

5. Choose one of the following research articles (A-D).  Was this true in your experience or at your school?

 

A.  College and Latent Political Attitudes

Campbell and Horowitz (2016) studied whether liberal values were a product of higher education.  They focused on civil liberties, gender egalitarianism and political party affiliation.  They found that college seems to affect the belief in civil liberties and gender egalitarianism but that political party affiliation was more likely influenced by family background.

Tamkinaut Rauf's 2021 research, How College Makes Liberals (or Conservatives)

 finds that,

Empirical research largely dismisses such claims [

that colleges may be sites of liberal “indoctrination”]

, showing that political influence in college operates not through institutional characteristics but peers (Dey 1997; Hanson et al. 2012; Milem 1998).Results from hierarchical multinomial logistic regressions suggest that identity transitions were driven by both the political composition of peer networks and influences outside the educational institution, such as family and prior socialization.

Extra: 

From Current Affairs (2018), The Stereotypes about Free Speech and College Students Are False

B.  This 2017 research by Elizabeth Lawrence examines the connection between college education and healthier lifestyle behaviors.  Here is her abstract:

Do you think that Lawrence's research is an example of manifest or latent lessons?  Why or why not?

C.  School Extracurriculars, Identity and Academic Success

Andrew Guest and Barbara Schneider from University of Chicago published in Sociology of Education (2003) about the importance of extracurriculars and how they shape students' identities differently depending on the type of school the students attend.   Here is a summary from the discussion section:

Are these findings true for your high school experience?  What specific ways?

D.  School Culture Affects How Students Think About Themselves as Students and How to Be Successful

Lisa Nunn researched how school cultures shape the students that attend each school.  Her findings are published in her book, Defining Student Success.  Read a preview from Google books here, and from Rutgers University Press, also available through JSTOR here.  And there is a detailed review of Nunn's work from LUC's Dr. Judson Everitt, available on JSTOR here or from U of Chicago Press here.

Dr. Everitt's review shows that Nunn finds three different types of schools (Alternative, Comprehensive and Elite) that affect students' views of themselves as learners:

“Alternative High,” “Comprehensive High,” and “Elite Charter” each have distinct organizational structures and practices that cultivate unique school- level cultural meanings about success. 

 

Alternative High operates on a non-traditional school model intended to improve the prospects of low-income students by both helping them fulfill college entrance requirements and pre- paring them for the working world in their areas of interest. The local cultural wisdom at Alternative High promotes what Nunn calls a “success- through-effort” perspective among students, in which students define success as achievable entirely through effort with little dependence on intelligence. 

Comprehensive High is a more traditional high school that serves a large and ethnoracially diverse student body, and promotes a perspective that combines elements of “success-through-effort” with what Nunn calls “success-through- intelligence.” Effort is necessary but not sufficient for success, according to this school’s culture; one must also possess an innate intelligence that enables understanding of academic material. 

Elite Charter is a high-performing, college-preparatory charter school serving a predominantly affluent student body where students are focused almost exclusively on academic performance that will earn them entrance to elite colleges. Here, intelligence is viewed as the foundation of success, and the “success-through-effort” element is modified into the idea of “initiative,” through which outstanding students can demonstrate their “passion” for learning.

Was your high school one of these three types?  Do you think that your high school affected how the students thought of themselves as students (aka their sense of self)?  

For more on Sociology and Education/School checkout SOCL 245:

 

Peers as an Agent of Socialization

Friends/Peer Groups
Friends and peer groups are very influential for Americans.  For example, there is evidence that the most important factor in statistically predicting whether a teen will take up a particular deviant behavior (such as smoking or crime) is the presence or absence of peers who also engage in that behavior.  Here are some important conclusions that sociologists have claimed about the influence of friends/peers:

• Peer groups tend to be influenced by homophily, or the tendency for people to be around others who are similar to themselves.  
• Peer influence starts especially because of school and cohort groups, and becomes significant by adolescence, sometimes more intense and more influential than family.  
• Adolescents spend more time with each other in age-related cohorts than with parents or anyone else. This leads to an adolescent subculture.

From Our World in Data: 

 

Adult Peer Networks: Mark Granovetter's Strength of Weak Ties (1973)

Research from Mark Granovetter (1973) has become one of the most cited sociology research articles ever.  It is called The Strength of Weak Ties.   His research found that an individual's strong ties are usually overlapping and thus redundant, so they do not provide connections as much as weak ties.  Weak ties extend an individual's network opening more connections:

1. Weak Ties as Bridges: Weak ties serve as bridges between different social groups, allowing information to travel further than it would through strong ties, which tend to be redundant.
2. Job Opportunities & Information Flow: Granovetter’s research found that people often secure jobs through weak ties rather than strong ones because acquaintances provide access to new and diverse information.
3. Network Structure & Social Mobility: Societies with many weak ties are more cohesive and dynamic, as weak ties help integrate different subgroups, fostering innovation and economic mobility.
4. Implications for Social Influence: Weak ties help spread ideas, trends, and social movements across different communities, making them essential for societal change.

Overall, Granovetter’s theory demonstrates that weak social connections are surprisingly powerful in shaping social networks, career opportunities, and the diffusion of information.

Stanford U explains the importance of Granovetter's research here (2023).  The  theory was also retested and found to still be valid as published in Science 2022.

Friend Sources Throughout the Lifecourse of Males and Females

Where do Americans find their friends at different ages?  How are males and females friend sources different?  Sociologist Reuben Thomas provides some evidence on his homepage.   Thomas explains his research:

The survey began with the instruction: “Think about the 2 friends you most often socialize with face-to-face. Do not include family members or boyfriends/girlfriends.” I chose the phrase “most often socialize with” to elicit the friendships most involved in the respondents’ non-work, recreational time. This did not ask the respondents’ to choose based on strength of bond or affection, but purely on frequency of shared social activities, in the present tense. Fischer’s (1982) comparison of ego network name generators found that joint social activities was the best predictor that the alter would be labeled a ‘friend,’ better than discussing personal matters, or any of the other several name generators he used. The specification “face-to-face” discouraged respondents from listing long-distance confidants or other people who were outside of their regular social activities. Though non-local ties can be very strong, and important in many ways, they cannot provide many types of support that local ties can (e.g. child-care), cannot participate in most physical social events (dinners, parties, etc.) and are thus much less likely to have ties to other members of the respondents’ local social networks (Martin and Yeung 2006), or introduce new alters. The focus on local friendship ties in this study is an effort to measure the characteristics of the cores of the non-kin informal social networks that respondents are embedded within

The survey asked respondents how they met each friend, and provided a text box to type in their answers in their own words. The majority of answers were very simple and to the point, such as “at church” or “work.” Some answers were too ambiguous or minimal to provide any clear information, such as “since childhood” or “at home,” which I coded as missing. I defined voluntary organizations loosely to include hobbies, sports and similar activities as well as more formal organizations. I use the label “college” to include all post-secondary education, including 15 when respondents used the word “school” to describe an educational setting in adulthood. I coded as “neighbor” friends who were introduced by a neighbor, but the great majority of this category are friends who are/were the respondents’ neighbors.

Examine his findings in this graphic:

Similar research from Henrik Lindberg shows;

Time with friends, colleagues, siblings, and children diminishes over the course of a lifetime. The older we get, the person we spend the most time with is the one we see in the mirror.

That’s the conclusion of a recent, fascinating analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey, an annual census by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics of how Americans spend their hours. Data scientist Henrik Lindberg combed through results from 2003 to 2015 to determine how much of that time is spent in the company of others.

6.  Can you identify a difference between where males and females find their friends?  At what age is this difference?  Is this true for you - where are most of your own friends from?

Friends with Academic Benefits:  Friend Network Structure and Influence on College Success by Janice McCabe

Based on her book Connecting in College,  the article in Contexts called "Friends with Academic Benefits by Janice McCabe from Dartmouth Sociology Department, McCabe analyzes three different structures of friend groups for college students.  I will summarize the article's findings below, but the full article is linked above.  Try to read my summary below and answer question 1, but if you need more context or if you are interested in the rest of the article, see the link above.

McCabe analyzes the structure of peer networks, the type of friends in the network and differences between race and class.  She finds 3 different structures of friend networks.  She calls these three structures "tight-knitters, compartmentalizers, and samplers....tight-knitters’ networks resemble a ball of yarn, compartmentalizers’ a bow-tie, and samplers’ a daisy."

Tightknitters  

Tight-knitters have one densely woven friendship group in which nearly all their friends are friends with one another.... Most tight-knitters were students of color who found the social  support of their network helpful in navigating a predominantly White campus. Some tight-knitters had friendship networks that helped them academically in multiple ways. Tight-knit networks, however, did not always pull students up academically. They pulled some tight-knitters down, helping to reproduce race- and class-based inequalities.  About half of the 22 tight-knitters in my sample were ... surrounded by friends who pulled them away from academics. Nearly all students discussed friends distracting them from academics, but for lower-achieving tight-knitters who did not graduate from MU or who graduated but with low GPAs and in more than four years, friends were a constant distraction. All behaviors—negative and positive—were quite contagious within tight-knit networks. Consequently, all tight-knitters who described their friends as providing academic support and motivation graduated; only half of the tight-knitters who felt they lacked this support graduated.  

Compartmentalizers 

Compartmentalizers’ friends form two to four clusters, where friends know each other within clusters but rarely across them.  Compartmentalized networks look like a bow-tie, with distinct clusters of friends. Students’ friends within each of the 2-4 clusters were connected to each other, but friends were not connected across clusters. Like Betsy, most compartmentalizers were White and middle-class. They typically had one socially oriented cluster and one academically oriented cluster. She felt her two clusters of friends enabled her to balance schoolwork and friendly fun, and she graduated in four years. Students with more than two clusters of friends felt pressure—on their time and identity—in keeping up with multiple friendship groups. The clusters provided a sense of belonging, but maintaining ties can be demanding, and these demands escalated with each additional cluster.  All compartmentalizers had separate academic and social clusters of friends.  In general, compartmentalizers came from more advantaged backgrounds, experienced greater ease on campus, and succeeded in college with less support from friends as compared to those with other network types. Friendships among students from more advantaged backgrounds helped to reproduce their advantages. 

 

 

Samplers

Samplers make a friend or two from a variety of places, but the friends remain unconnected to each other. Students of color frequently described experiencing race-based isolation on campus regardless of their network type; samplers, however, remained isolated. They rarely discussed isolating experiences with friends, and samplers were ambivalent at best about whether their friends provided social support or whether they needed social support.  Samplers are academically successful in spite of their friends. Their friends provide little academic help or engagement, but they don’t pull the samplers down academically either. Negative behaviors that were contagious within tight-knitters’ networks did not spread within samplers’ networks due to lack of ties among friends. In other words, their network structure shielded samplers from friends’ negative influences. While samplers demonstrate that friends are not necessary for academic success, one can’t help but wonder if they might be even more successful if they allowed or encouraged their friends to become friends with academic benefits.

7.  Do you have friends with academic benefits or do your friends influence you to be less successful academically? Can you identify your own social network structure based on the models in the article?

Here is Janice McCabe's latest book, Making, Keeping and Losing Friends: How College Campuses Shape College Students' Networks

McCabe shows that the way a college is structured—whether students live in dorms or commute, study abroad or stay close to campus, have plentiful common areas for clubs to meet or not—can either encourage or hinder the making of meaningful friendships.

8.  Analyze one of the research studies below for the importance of peers as agents of socialization.   Try to apply the research to your own friends/peers network.  Is it similar for you or different and in what ways? 

A.  Friend Groups and Influence on Choice of Study

This 2019 article from the journal Sociology of Education shows that your friends will influence the likelihood of you being in STEM classes or not. From the article,

     We find strong evidence that students adjust their preferences to those of their friends (friend influence). Moreover, girls tend to retain their STEM preferences when other girls in their classroom also like STEM (peer exposure). We conclude that these mechanisms amplify preexisting preferences and thereby contribute to the observed dramatic widening of the STEM gender gap....Homophily, the tendency for friends to be similar in multiple regards (e.g., in their gender or sex category, age, attitudes, and cultural taste) is widely documented (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). This can be due to friend selection, that is, the tendency to befriend others who are similar, but, in the case of changeable characteristics, it can also be due to social influence....

     First, both boys and girls are influenced to like what their friends like. Because students mostly have same-sex friends, gender-specific tendencies of influence will emerge. Boys, who have higher probabilities to like STEM to begin with (in our observed time period), are likely to be further influenced toward STEM because their friends are likely to be boys, who are, again, more likely to have pre-existing STEM preferences. Girls, having lower probabilities to like STEM already, are likely further influenced by other girls, who are also less likely to prefer STEM. However, these are just general tendencies. Depending on the particular friends one might have, individual implications can also be different (e.g., cases where girls are friends with more boys than with girls, or with girls who like STEM). 

     Second, regarding STEM subjects, other girls’ preferences in the classroom matter. Having other female students in a class who prefer STEM can protect girls from being discouraged from STEM subjects. This implies that along with friends’ subject preferences, the negotiation of gender politics in the classroom is also important for girls’ STEM preferences. Our findings suggest the STEM pipeline model should be conceived as a social pipeline model, in which effects of peer exposure and friend influence are considered important factors in female dropout from STEM careers.

Are you in STEM?  Are your friends?  Is this article's conclusion true for you?

B.  College Roommates and Risky Behavior

This article from the Journal of Health and Behavior examines whether college roommates will influence each other to be more aggressive, smoke, or be sexually active.  READ CAREFULLY - the findings are not as simple as most students assume they will be.  Remember to read the abstract first, then the conclusion/discussion section.

What did the researchers conclude about having college roommates that engage in risky behavior?  

C.  Peer Groups from High School to College

How are students influenced by attending a college where more of their high school classmates attend?

Research from Fletcher and Tienda (2009) 

D.  Strength of Peer Influence on Preadolescents

Patricia and Peter Adler are very well-published in the area of adolescent peer socialization.  Their book called Peer Power is an extensive exploration into the world of adolescents and their effect on each other.  From Google books,  

Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, Peter and Patti Adler discuss the vital components of the lives of preadolescents, popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how people are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders maintain their power and popularity, and how individuals' social experiences and feelings about themselves differ from the top of the pecking order to the bottom. In so doing, the Adlers focus their attention on the peer culture of the children themselves and the way this culture extracts and modifies elements from adult culture. Children's peer culture, as it is nourished in those spaces where grown-ups cannot penetrate, stands between individual children and the larger adult society.  As such, it is a mediator and shaper, influencing the way children collectively interpret their surroundings and deal with the common problems they face.

2.06 Family as an Agent of Socialization

Please review this NY Magazine piece about Carolyn Dweck's book, Mindset.

Today's Lesson:

What are the ways that family influences individuals? 

What are the ways that family is changing in the U.S.?

How does this research compare to your family?

Family, The Most Influential Agent of Socialization: Family Nurture shapes our Nature

As we explained during our lesson about nature and nurture, humans are born helpless but wired to connect with other humans. This connection shapes our self-concept before we are even conscious of it.  The nurture we receive affects our brain growth and literally makes our brain (our nature) grow.  Human brain development happens most rapidly and greatly in the first few years after birth.  This UNICEF website (2016) explains what experts have concluded about brain development.  Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel explains the latest conclusions in this 5 min video.  

The point is that much growth and development happens in the earliest years of human life so our first caregivers have an enormous impact on who we become.  These caregivers are organized around a family - an emotional and economic unit that are committed to one another and care for one another.  This definition emphasizes that family is not just a biological or legal unit but also a social one, defined by the bonds, roles, and functions members perform for each other and for society, such as socialization and providing support. 

Manifest Lessons

Besides the way that family influences human nature, family also teaches us how to think and act from a young age. For example, when I was young my parents taught me to say please and thank you. They strictly told me to never smoke cigarettes and to try my best when doing a job.  These direct lessons that we are taught intentionally are called manifest lessons.

Latent Lessons

However, much of what we learn is taught to us unintentionally by watching our family.  These lessons are called latent lessons. Before we are even conscious of it, we watch and imitate our family and absorb the lessons as part of our self. This influence occurs even if we are not aware of it or we do not intend for it.  In my life, I was influenced to have certain mannerisms and gestures just like my parents. And I considered careers that were just like them too.

Google Form for today's lesson.

Answer individually  

1.  What are some ways that you are similar to your family? Is this latent or manifest?  Why?

Family and the Self

Longitudinal research from Yabiku, Axinn and Thorton (1999) American Journal of Sociology) explains that the way that families are structured/integrated with one another when a child is young, affects the children's self-esteem when they are adults.  

This research supports the idea that family nurture such as warmth, monitoring, and security all affect children's "self" and their self-esteem.  Similarly, research from Krauss and Robins finds many ways that family environment influences how children feel about themselves enduring into their later life as adults.

From Krauss, S., Orth, U., & Robins, R. W. (2020). Family environment and self-esteem development: A longitudinal study from age 10 to 16. Journal of personality and social psychology, 119(2), 457–478. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000263

The conclusion cited by Kraus and Robins in the last paragraph above shows that 

some parents will praise their children with good intentions trying to boost their children's self-esteem. However, this praise can have the opposite effect.  

Dweck's Mindset and the Influence of Family on Our Self as Learners

Carolyn Dweck writes about the latent effects that parents can have on their children's sense of self as learners in her book Mindset.

I was featured as a storyteller for a nonprofit organization that teaches literacy to adults. At their story telling slam, I explained how my own sense of self as a learner was affected by my parents and how, subsequently, Dweck's reasearch influenced my sense of self as a learner.  Watch my story on Facebook here or embedded below:

More about Dweck's Research

• Carol Dweck explains how parents, and eventually schools, both can unintentionally create a fixed mindset that actually prevents learning.  
• See the first chapter of her book here.
• This Atlantic article the latest update to Dweck's research which shows that praise cannot be empty.  It must be directed in specific nuanced ways to promote growth.
• This NPR review of the book includes an excerpt and an interview.
• This NY Magazine article explains how to apply Dweck's research to parenting and talking to kids.
• Brain Pickings review of Dweck's Research provides a thorough explanation and a few quotes from the book.
• Dweck explains her work on this TED Talk
• And she explains how we can teach a growth mindset in this talk from Stanford U.
• Farnam Street blog explains the two mindsets.

2.  Using Dweck's research, explain how you have been shaped to have either a "growth mindset" or a "fixed mindset."

Cross-Cultural Example of Family and Production of Culture and the Self
Life Lessons from Chinese Culture from NPR shows how families influence kids to accept aspects of their culture,What are the hidden messages in the storybooks we read to our kids? That's a question that may occur to parents as their children dive into the new books that arrived over the holidays.  And it's a question that inspired a team of researchers to set up a study. Specifically, they wondered how the lessons varied from storybooks of one country to another. 

The Changing Structure of Family

3.  If I told you that I live with my family, who would you assume I mean?

4.  What are some other ways to define family different than above?

My family and I dressed up as the family from Despicable Me one Halloween.  This was one of my favorite costumes but it also is an interesting example of the changing family in the U.S.  Most often, when Americans think of "family" they think of the nuclear family - two heterosexual partners, married and their children.  Although this is an ideal in many Americans' minds, sociologists question whether or not it was ever a reality.  Most family researchers will trace this back to the post-WWII era when these types of families seemed to peak.  However, the romanticized notion may be from media that created an ideal image of this family even if the reality was much different then and certainly is now.

The Impossible Ideal of the Nuclear Family

One sociologist who researched the American family extensively using historical methods is Stephanie Coontz who writes,

Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home has never been his castle, the ‘male breadwinner marriage’ is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz provides a myth-shattering examination of two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, looking at what has and has not changed since the original publication in 1992, and exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and rising economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era.

Here is a review of Coontz's book from the New Republic.

Here is a review of her work on Goodreads.

Changing Household Structure

From the PEW Research Center, Trends Shaping the US (2017):

Americans’ lives at home are changing. Following a decades-long trend, just half of U.S. adults were married in 2015, down from 70% in 1950. As marriage has declined, the number in cohabiting relationships (living with an unmarried partner) rose 29% between 2007 and 2016, from 14 million to 18 million. The increase was especially large among those ages 50 and older: 75% in the same period. The “gray divorce” rate – divorces among those 50 and older – roughly doubled between 1990 and 2015.
Also, a record number of Americans (nearly 61 million in 2014) were living in multigenerational households, that is, households that include two or more adult generations or grandparents and grandchildren. Growing racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. helps explain some of the rise in multigenerational living. The Asian and Hispanic populations overall are growing more rapidly than the white population, and those groups are more likely than whites to live in multigenerational family households.

 

Here is a graph from Phil Cohen showing different types of households by decade 1900-2017:

5.  What is one conclusion that can you make from the graph?

Americans are more accepting of the changing structures than they have ever been. From the Pew:

As family structures change in U.S., a growing share of Americans say it makes no difference
The American family is changing in many ways: Cohabitation is on the rise, more adults are delaying or forgoing marriage, a growing share of children are living with an unmarried parent, and same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states.  Amid these changes, three-in-ten U.S. adults think it’s a good thing that there is growing variety in the types of family arrangements people live in, while about half as many (16%) say this is a bad thing. The largest share (45%) don’t think it makes a difference, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2019.

Where couples meet has changed over time

Here is longitudinal data from Stanford showing the changing places where couples have met over time:

6.  If you are in a relationship, how does this compare to where you met? 

If your parents were a couple in a relationship, where did they meet?

And this video on Youtube shows the change over time:

American and Cohabitation

From the PEW, 

Trends in Divorce

From Phil Cohen

(Legal marriage age is determined by state laws see here for more and the graphic below)

6.  What demographic is most likely to divorce according to the graphs above?  What other conclusions can make from the graphs above?

Where Americans live as adults is connected to Family as well

From The NY Times Upshot (2015), based on a U Mich study:

Americans and Interracial Marriage

From PEW: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/

7.  Who is most likely to intermarry?  Is this surprising to you - why/why not? 

8.  Hypothesize why these groups may intermarry more.