The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood
01 May 2016-Contemporary Sociology (SAGE PublicationsSage CA: Los Angeles, CA)-Vol. 45, Iss: 3, pp 279-280
TL;DR: The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood as mentioned in this paper examines the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006.
Abstract: Baltimore entered the national spotlight in April 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing citywide protests. While The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood does not deal specifically with issues of police brutality, its focus on the urban disadvantaged in Baltimore feels particularly important given these recent events. This book is the culmination of over two decades of research by some of sociology’s most respected scholars. Utilizing a life course developmental perspective, the authors examine the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006. A particular strength of the sample is the oversampling of poor whites. The existence and inclusion of poor and lower SES whites allows the researchers to examine racial differences within, and not simply across, socioeconomicstrata,a strategy that is often missing from studies of urban poverty. While the BSSYP study followed the children through high school, the authors fielded additional surveys after high school when the sample averaged age 22 (the Young Adult Survey, YAS) and 28 (the Mature Adult Survey, MAS). Sprinkled throughout the text are also short qualitative quotes used to illustrate some statistical points. The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to Baltimore, discusses the challenges facing the urban poor, and describes the study’s sampling and methods. The second chapter provides a relatively brief synopsis of Baltimore’s movement from ‘‘industrial boom’’ to ‘‘industrial bust.’’ While this narrative will be familiar to those with knowledge of the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities through the twentieth century, the authors do a particularly nice job of reminding readers that while these events might now seem to be in the distant past, they were crucial events in the life course of their sample’s parents. Chapters Three and Four focus on the early life of the BSSYP, paying specific attention to how family (Chapter 3) and neighborhood and school (Chapter 4) influence young people. Given that the research looks at these young people and their families in the early 1980s, much of what is discussed in these chapters should be familiar to readers. In Chapter Five, the authors move beyond the BSSYP and examine their sample’s transition into adulthood. The authors analyze four demographic markers: gaining employment, marrying (or partnering), moving out of the parental home, and becoming parents. They then identify the most common patterns of completion (or lack thereof) of these markers and the family background most often attached to these patterns. Those still reading this review carefully will notice educational completion is not included in the patterns discussed above. This is unique, as education has generally been treated as one of the ‘‘traditional’’ markers of the transition to adulthood by scholars. The authors argue that while the other transitions are clear-cut (that is, one clearly becomes a parent or does not), education does not have as finite an end and therefore is not included in these analyses. Instead, levels of education and employment (occupational status and earnings) are the socioeconomic destinations of the sample the authors focus on in Chapters Six through Eight. The authors find that baccalaureate completion by age 28 is particularly difficult for those from the lowest socioeconomic strata in the sample. There are also differences in employment by race and gender, a topic examined
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the mixed results observed in previous studies indicate that parental involvement does not operate through the typical channels posited by researchers, educators, and policymakers and that traditional measures of parental involvement fail to capture the fundamental ways in which parents help their children academically.
Abstract: The Coleman Report posited that the inequality of educational opportunity appears to stem from the home itself and the cultural influences immediately surrounding the home. However, this line of inquiry assumes that school and home processes operate in isolation, which is often not the case. An example of how families and schools can reinforce one another is through parental involvement. Whereas some studies suggest that children have better achievement outcomes when their parents are involved in their education, other studies challenge the link between parental involvement and academic outcomes. One major reason for this lack of consensus among scholars is that parents’ involvement has been measured differently across studies. Thus, scholars’ disagreements about how parents should be involved and about which aspects of parental involvement are associated with improvements in children’s academic outcomes have contributed to inconsistent findings. We argue that the mixed results observed in previous studies indicate that parental involvement does not operate through the typical channels posited by researchers, educators, and policymakers and that traditional measures of parental involvement fail to capture the fundamental ways in which parents help their children academically. We propose a framework of parental involvement that might provide some clarity on how parental involvement operates.
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TL;DR: This research examines how teens from an urban area in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA regulate their use of technology and describes four factors impacting these practices, including local policies and access, affective factors, life stage and future goals, and relationships.
Abstract: We examine how teens from an urban area in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA regulate their use of technology. We framed our research using everyday life information seeking theory [43] and information ecologies [35]. Using a survey, audio and photo diary study, creative free response activity, and semi-structured interviews, we examine teens' perceptions of their everyday life technology use and factors that influence changes in that use, with a focus on understanding non-use, low use, and intentional self-regulation. We describe four factors impacting these practices, including local policies and access, affective factors, life stage and future goals, and relationships. We describe how shifting use practices function in the lives of these teens and discuss the importance of acknowledging teens' skills and preferences for supporting their technology use management.
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Cites background from "The Long Shadow: Family Background,..."
...We used parental education as a proxy for socio-economic status, or SES [31]....
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...In addition to the indicators from the MYC and our survey, which suggests many of our participants come from lower SES backgrounds, approximately half of the participants described their paid work experiences and discussed how they contributed to their own, and in some cases their families’, finances....
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...Research on youth from these communities has some common threads focusing on impacts of lower SES [4] and violence [16, 34]....
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...Some have described discussion of youth and families from urban settings as having a “deficit narrative” that operates in intersection with race, SES, and class [21]....
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TL;DR: This article conducted interviews with 106 young adults of different social class backgrounds and found that they had significantly different knowledge of cultural capital in conditions of uncertainty, and that cultural capital operated differently in different social classes.
Abstract: How do differences in cultural capital operate in conditions of uncertainty? Interviews with 106 young adults of different social class backgrounds demonstrate significantly different knowledge of ...
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Cites background from "The Long Shadow: Family Background,..."
...…is significantly shaped by a host of factors, notably including social class, but also immigration status (Gonzales 2011), race and ethnicity (Alexander et al. 2014; Fuligni and Pedersen 2002; Mollekopf et al. 2004), gender (Oesterle et al. 2010), and sexual orientation (Needham andAustin…...
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...Indeed, although sweeping changes in the economy and in family life have profoundly altered the transition to adulthood for youth across the board, this experience is significantly shaped by a host of factors, notably including social class, but also immigration status (Gonzales 2011), race and ethnicity (Alexander et al. 2014; Fuligni and Pedersen 2002; Mollekopf et al. 2004), gender (Oesterle et al....
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...Thus, family background continues to exert a considerable influence on the life trajectories of young people (Alexander et al. 2014)....
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TL;DR: Local organizations can serve as landmarks that orient residents' understanding of space and foster social ties through regular and repeated interaction as discussed by the authors, and they can be used to orient residents to local landmarks.
Abstract: Local organizations can serve as landmarks that orient residents’ understanding of space and foster social ties through regular and repeated interaction. Depending on their location, schools can se...
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Cites background from "The Long Shadow: Family Background,..."
...For example, in their book on the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, Alexander et al. (2014) argue that certain neighborhoods in Baltimore remained predominantly white during the 1980s and 1990s because those neighborhoods had clearly defined physical geographic features as borders,…...
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TL;DR: This article examined explanations for these inequalities using longitudinal administrative data on a cohort of male parolees age eighteen to twenty-five and found that early post-prison experiences and social context explain some variation.
Abstract: That formerly incarcerated black men experience poor life-course outcomes relative to other subpopulations is well established, yet our ongoing research indicates substantial racial inequality in outcomes among the formerly incarcerated. Young, black former prisoners lag behind their white counterparts in achieving traditional adulthood markers: education, employment, and residential independence. We examine explanations for these inequalities using longitudinal administrative data on a cohort of male parolees age eighteen to twenty-five. We find that early postprison experiences and social context explain some variation. Considerable racial inequality persists, however, even as we control for pre- and postprison life-course conditions, criminal justice contact, and social context. We discuss this in relation to estimates of discrimination, stigma, and social networks not observable in our data.
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Abstract: Despite the major cultural and political differences between the United States and China, in both countries access to jobs is supposed to be guided by fair and equitable procedures. In the US, there is a presumption of an open labor market in which potential employees compete on the basis of their qualifications, where the fairness of decisions is guided by anti-discrimination laws and normative organizational policies. In China, although there is a history of close relationships that guide the exchange of favors, following the 1949 revolution, Communist Party leaders were given the authority to allocate positions in ways that were supposed to eliminate special privileges of class and background. Yet recent research has suggested that social connections are an important part of getting a job in both the US and China for two-thirds to three-quarters of job seekers. In the US context, such connections are described as social capital. In the Chinese context, connections are defined as guanxi. In this article, we review research on labor market processes in both the US and China to address three important questions: (a) How can we understand the similar functioning of labor markets in such distinct cultural and political systems as the US and China? (b) What are the mechanisms or processes by which people find jobs in the US and China, and how are people able to access these mechanisms or processes in the context of constraining social structures and legal environments? and (c) What are the theoretical implications of the ‘generalized particularism’ that seems to shape labor markets in both the US and China.
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