Search Results

This chapter addresses high-achieving adolescents' vulnerability to peer cultures that are oppositional to the norms and values of schools. These include youth subcultures in which students are ridiculed for achievement-related behaviors in both racialized and non-racialized ways. Whereas the previous chapter considered where and when taunts of acting white for achievement-related behaviors occur, the present chapter investigates why some high-achieving black adolescents succumb to pressure to conform to oppositional aspects of the peer environment at their schools while others are able to resist and reject such pressures. It demonstrates that there are conditions (both internal and external) that help high-achieving adolescents resist, reject, or ignore this type of negative peer pressure. These include, for example, a strong sense of identity (who they are and are not) and clear post-high school goals and aspirations. The chapter also shows that the age at which adolescents develop the characteristics and goals that keep them focused on academic achievement varies.

This chapter provides some reflections on how the peer cultures of students may change, as they grow older; and on the cultural and structural influences on second-generation academic achievement. Many behaviors in school that are detrimental to academic achievement do not in fact stem from disinterest in academic achievement or a rejection of mainstream institutions and norms, but the quest for peer status. The low achievement among some children of immigrants leads to the requirement of different policies for improving academic achievement. Some key policy recommendations for improving academic achievement among children of immigrants include that schooling should help students' balancing acts between their peer social worlds and academic achievement via code-switching and decision-making skills, and that schools should engage youth cultures.

This chapter explores aspects of peer culture that are thought to conflict with academic achievement: attitudes and beliefs (about racism and discrimination, peer culture attitudes, and perceptions of opportunities) and behavioral scripts with respect to conflict. In terms of attitudes and beliefs, there is little evidence for oppositional peer cultures and no evidence that perceptions of discrimination lead to low aspirations. The few students who express oppositional attitudes cannot account for the overall low achievement rates, where only a minority of students leave qualified to start a university education. In terms of behavior, teens place much importance on defending self-pride and showing toughness when it comes to conflict with peers, which sometimes end in physical fighting. Engaging in peer conflicts serves two purposes: preventing real, physical violence, because in schools, appearing weak led to being bullied; and also, because it brought peer status by demonstrating self-pride and toughness. These conflicts do not signal defiance of school authorities or opposition to school norms, nor do they stem from a lack of interest in academic excellence. Rather, they are described by teens as inevitable and sometimes necessary responses to situations at school. As with consumption, gender is found to matter. For young men, masculinity is tied to toughness, defending self-pride, and being seen as hip. Pressures of masculinity lead boys to place more importance on maintaining self-pride among peers. This connection makes boys even more invested in peer status than their girl counterparts, for whom femininity is less likely to come into conflict with adult school culture.

This chapter discusses classification systems that exist within music and its peer culture-producing fields. It emphasizes the role of power in setting boundaries around categories and defining these categories as legitimate. It considers the application of this model of classification to the sociological study of science and collective memory. Finally, it addresses the future of music, and closes with a consideration of the link between music categories and taste. It argues that our tastes are instruments of power and that there are three important components to this instrument. First, tastes encode the power of your origins. When it comes to taste, the socialization process—specifically, the process of acquiring a “habitus”—plays a central role in shaping our desires, aspirations, and choices. Second, this socialization process teaches us not only what tastes are appropriate to our life circumstances, but also how to make meaning from the consumption process. Third, taste is used to exert and reveal power in subtle ways.

In this chapter, we explore tensions in smart girls’ lives by focusing on how girls and boys negotiate gender and peer culture. While girls are deemed to be the new dominant sex in education and beyond, we offer stories that illustrate the strategies girls used in order to negotiate their smart identities. We explore the challenges of a smart girl identity in relation to popularity, sexual desirability, fitting in, and standing out. We also explore the strategic negotiations of girls in contrast to boys, who used different tactics to manage their academic success.

This book aims to take us beyond our usual perspectives on adolescent sexuality. Medical and public health literatures conceptualize adolescent sexuality primarily in terms of individual risk-taking and the factors that augment or lessen such risks. American developmental psychologists tend to view adolescent sexuality as part of adolescents' separation from their parents and as an aspect of development that is especially perilous given the disjuncture between teenagers' physical and cognitive development. American sociologists have generally bypassed the parent-teenager nexus to focus on relationships and networks among teenagers in romance and peer groups. They have examined how peer cultures and networks and the status hierarchies within them impact adolescent sexuality. Finally, gender scholars have examined how teenage girls' and boys' experiences of sexuality are profoundly shaped by gender inequalities—including the sexual double standard.

Chapter 3 focuses on first-generation students who fit a Play Hard geography. Although academic achievement is important for many Play Hard students, it is less of a driver in students’ lives than for those in other geographies. Students arrange their lives more around leisure, participating in high-status social venues of athletics and/or Greek Letter Organizations where they meet more peers from more affluent and continuing-generation families than those in other geographies. Most who entered a Play Hard geography participate in athletics and/or attended a private high school. The small percentage of first-generation students who make their way into a Play Hard geography includes the greatest variation of experience along gender and racialized lines. Students located in a Play Hard geography experience varying levels of comfort, often participating at a steep cost to their sense of self-esteem or enjoyment.

Chapter 2 provides a portrait of first-generation students who attend selective colleges by placing them in comparison with continuing-generation students, the dominant demographic group on these campuses. This chapter focuses on students’ high school backgrounds—the ways they get to college—and then discusses briefly the ways this background leads them into an initial institutional sorting process. While first-generation students share a similarly strong high school academic profile as their continuing-generation counterparts, they come of age within very different contexts. The authors show that some of these differences have implications for how first-generation students identify connections on campus during the first few weeks of college. Moreover, first-generation students find themselves in somewhat different campus geographies than continuing-generation at the end of their first year of college. First-generation are more likely to be Disconnected than their continuing-generation peers and less embedded in campus geographies connected to mainstream social life (Play Hard and Multisphere).

Chapter 4 describes first-generation students in a Work Hard geography. These academically engaged students made not only classes and homework central to their daily lives, but their friendships and social lives also were often rooted in either academic work and/or nonathletic extracurricular interests. Work Hard students report close faculty relationships and strong friendships, often with those from similar demographic backgrounds, but they are also lonely outside those spheres, avoiding the high-status social hubs of campus. Most students in this geography came through Summer Bridge, and much of their campus engagement is in reaction to the racism, classism, and sexism they feel and observe on campus. They have created friendship communities that provide affirmation and support and crafted geographies that link their social, extracurricular, and academic priorities. The overlap of these spaces provides a buffer but does not connect these students to wealthier peers.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to existing research on first-generation college students and argues that institutions need to learn more about the heterogeneity among first generation students to better serve this population. The authors describe their three broad questions: First, what are the different ways that first-generation students organize their social, extracurricular, and academic lives at selective and highly selective colleges? Second, how do first generation students sort themselves and get sorted into these different types of campus lives? Third, how do these different patterns of campus engagement prepare first-generation students for their post-college lives? The authors then provide an overview of their arguments and explain how their concept of campus geographies provides a new and useful lens. Finally, they describe their methods and provide an overview of the chapters in the book.

If multiple limitations contribute to antisocial behavior, then an adequate treatment program must be correspondingly multi-componential. Adequate social perspective-taking—perspective-taking that is profound or mature; rationalization-busting, adequately informed, and hence discerning; reciprocally ideal and balanced; and socially expansive or inclusive—should be a basic theme pervasive across the components of any effective treatment program. This chapter focuses on a multicomponent treatment program that incorporates a wide variety of social perspective-taking opportunities pertaining to the remediation of moral developmental delay, social cognitive distortions, and social skill deficiencies, namely, the EQUIP program. High-fidelity implementations of EQUIP can stimulate a positive synergy through EQUIP’s integration of mutual help (motivation, culture) and cognitive behavioral (curriculum) approaches. Chapter 8 concludes with a discussion of adaptations and outcome evaluations, and illustrates social perspective-taking treatments available for severe offenders.

Chapter 7 shows how campus geographies expose students to different models of success (or not) and shape their strategies for attaining that success. Play Hard students learn early not to prioritize academic outcomes above friendships and social life but rather to focus on building powerful networks with more affluent friends through parties, team sports, and Greek Life. Work Hard students, by contrast, remain in more class-segregated spaces, meaning they have less exposure to peers with upper-class habituses. They prioritize building their formal resume, connections with faculty, and having high grade point averages, which guide their decisions both academically and in terms of the kinds of extracurricular opportunities they seek out. Multisphere students rely on both academic and network strategies and seem to be comfortable navigating each, while Disconnected students struggle to locate a clear and consistent route toward post-college success and plan to rely on themselves.

Chapter 8 recaps the primary takeaways and discusses their implications for selective campuses. While campuses and scholarly literature generally treat first-generation students as a cohesive whole, this book speaks to a much more complicated process whereby students’ intersectional identities and preferences work along with institutional structures to sort first-generation students into one of several campus geographies that then lead to different types of connections with faculty, peers, extracurricular activities, and social engagements. Campus geographies are important because they provide informal social knowledge, tools, resources, and inclinations that may be more or less helpful both in college and as they prepare for post-college life. The authors close by discussing the implications of this research for selective colleges wishing to support a range of first-generation students more successfully.

Chapter 5 focuses on Multisphere students who incorporated elements from both Work Hard and Play Hard geographies, balancing serious academic work, strong extracurricular involvement, and social lives in high-status venues. Most Multisphere students arrived on campus through targeted orientation programs. While these led to early and lasting friendships, Multisphere respondents’ campus acclimation processes are distinguished by a pattern of branching out, locating strong peer ties in varied social locations. The way that students in this geography float among different spheres, able to be comfortable and successful in each, makes this the most fluid of the campus geographies. There are few first-generation students in this geography, and the authors think of them in some ways as being both outliers and examples of what is possible for first-generation students.

Chapter 6 provides an overview of students in a Disconnected geography. Consistent with previous research, the largest portion of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen sample are Disconnected. These students, while academically motivated and interested in a social life, struggled to make connections or find a niche, whether through classes, clubs, or social circles. One important commonality among Disconnected respondents was a delay in forming friendships: These students could not form early connections and described how difficult it was to make friends after the initial rush of being new together with other first-year students. Most students in Disconnected geographies did not participate in a substantial precollege program, wading into campus life on their own. Many of our Disconnected respondents were unhappy and unable to locate comfortable spaces on campus, in some cases despite long-term efforts to find a sense of belonging.

This chapter presents the children’s world of school yard play using data from approximately 1,500 children from 1991 to 2004. It shows how children integrate images of larger cultural battles within their creative peer culture through the use of spontaneous storytelling. It also highlights the complex culture of playing, and offers suggestions to anyone concerned about the children’s right to play.