Transition to Adulthood Flashcards
Arnett 2000 – Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens through the Twenties
Emerging adulthood is made up of personal discovery, risk taking, and identity development. This life stage exists due to demographic changes (delayed marriage, extended educ, etc.) and bc survey data shows people don’t identify as adults. The stage is distinct from adolescence and young adulthood. People aren’t tied down to commitments, move households frequently, and explore life trajectories. Research for wealthier individuals, including cross-culturally.
Crosnoe and Johnson 2011 – Research on Adolescence in the 21st Century
Using a life-course paradigm, they propose that research focuses on: developmental trajectories, social pathways, and social convoys. They list data sources that could prove useful: Children of the NLSY, ADDHealth, Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy. They call for multilevel modeling to take into account network and peer effects on outcomes (Browning et al. 2005), as schools and opportunities in neighborhoods are strong predictors of outcomes. They address how youth develop during their teenage years and point to both biological (MRI scans) and social pressure as reasons why this occurs. For this reason, adolescence is a time of change and acute sensitivity to social feedback. Sellers and associates (1998) find a racial identity for African American youth works on four axes: salience, centrality, regard, and ideology. More recently, research needs to look into how media use influences various outcomes. “Sociologists are well-positioned to demonstrate how biological processes cannot be understood absent a firm sociological understanding of the environment in which they play out over time, explain how the long reach of childhood is channeled through adolescence, and identify ways in which adolescence produces turning points and deflections in the life course.”
McLeod and Almazan 2003 – Connections between Childhood and Adulthood
McLeod and Almazan (2003) review research on the connection between childhood and adulthood. This research has three theoretical underpinnings: linear, contigencies, and transactions beteween individuals and environment. Based on the last category, the first two can be determined. They review health and findings from divorced families to inform their paper. The best part of the paper is when they review why status inequalities maintain across generations: social psych processes from parents to kids, structural featuers of the labor market, school-based ability groupings that priviledge certain backgrounds, and class-based access to social and cultural capital.
Silva 2012 – Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty
Through 93 interviews with adults from working class backgrounds, they suggest that people conceptualize the transition to adulthood in four camps: traditional, traditional-religioius, traditional-therapeutic, and therapeutic. Traditional identify adulthood through typical adult roles (the other two are obvious). Key is that working class (or poor) adults use a therapeutic lens to understand their transition to adulthood as they focus on overcoming past hardships, locating their current issues on those hardships, and expressing this experience to an outside agent (witness). Combins “expressive individualism” with Swidler’s “Cultural toolkit”. People without the mainstream toolkit develop a therapeutic one so they’re okay with the major instability. As people com to terms with the past, they develop an adult identity.
