Is the process of social interaction through which individuals learn and acquire culture?

Socialization in Infancy and Childhood

Socialization is the process whereby an individual’s standards, skills, motives, attitudes, and behaviors change to conform to those regarded as desirable and appropriate for his or her present and future role in any particular society. Many agents play a role in the socialization process including families, peers, neighborhoods, the mass media, schools, and religious institutions. It is assumed that these various agents function together rather than independently. Families have been recognized as an early pervasive and highly influential context for socialization. Infants and children are dependent on parents for nurturance and support from an early age, which accounts, in part, for their prominence as a socialization agent. We next consider peers, mass media, and neighborhood socialization influences. In this article, we will focus on parents, as well as sibling, co-parenting, and marital subsystems as contexts for socialization. Next, we will examine the determinants of parental socialization strategies. Finally, we examine the socialization roles of a variety of extrafamilial influences (e.g., peers, media).

Socialization generally refers to the process of social influence through which a person acquires the culture or subculture of their group, and in the course of acquiring these cultural elements the individual's self and personality are shaped. Socialization, therefore, addresses two important problems of social life: the problem of societal continuity and the problem of individual development. Sociology has tended to emphasize the latter more than the former, by focusing on the development of self and identities, and the internalization of roles, motives, and values. Sociological perspectives on socialization have been shaped largely by two major theoretical orientations: structure-functionalism, which views socialization largely as the learning of social roles; and symbolic interactionism, which emphasizes the development of self and identities. Current research on socialization is guided largely by symbolic interaction theory, and focuses on the process and outcomes of socialization across the life course as they occur within specific contexts of interaction, especially family, peers, school, workplace, and resocialization settings.

7 Socialization Research Methods

Socialization researchers tend to conduct longitudinal studies, use actual newcomers to organizations, and (often) use 3-month intervals (i.e., 3, 6, 9, and 12 months) to measure socialization-related variables, especially outcome measures. However, little empirical evidence has been offered to support the selection of these measurement periods beyond the fact that other studies have used them and found significant results using them. Often, the samples studied are college graduates or specific professionals such as nurses or accountants. Thus, what we know about socialization must be inferred from a relatively narrow set of occupations or job types studied.

Sociolinguistic approaches emphasizing language socialization

Language socialization studies emphasize the complex social norms that govern the use of specific language constructions. These studies clearly define the implicit and explicit socialization practices involved in the child's developing language.

The term language socialization refers to the interactional processes through which a child develops the competence required for participation in the social life of a particular community, including routine cultural practices, such as language and literacy activities. Language socialization research builds on the view that acquiring a language is part of a much larger process of becoming a member of society. The language socialization paradigm is concerned with two phenomena: how children are socialized to use language, and how they are socialized through the use of language.

Ochs and Schieffelin (1995) argue that language socialization accounts for children's grammatical development in terms of the indexical meanings of grammatical forms. Children are viewed as tuned into certain lexical meanings of grammatical forms, which link those forms to, for example, the social identities of interlocutors. They may use a form they do not hear often because it is indexically appropriate to use it. A language socialization approach relates children's use and understanding of linguistic forms to how information is linguistically presented within and across socially recognized situations.

3.1.1 Cultural Socialization

Cultural socialization refers to parental practices that teach children about their own race and ethnic heritage, cultural customs, and traditions. Examples of cultural socialization practices include talking about history or historical figures, reading culturally relevant books, celebrating cultural holidays, and encouraging children to use their native language. Parents are more likely to engage in discussions of cultural socialization than any other form of ethnic–racial socialization (e.g., preparation for bias, promotion of mistrust; Caughy, O’Campo, Randolph, & Nickerson, 2002; Hughes & Chen, 1999). In studies of Black families, the percentage of parents who report using cultural socialization ranges from 33% (Marshall, 1995) to 80% or more (Coard, Wallace, Stevenson, & Brotman, 2004). Phinney and Chavira (1995) found that, on average, Japanese parents report that roughly 66% of their ethnic–racial socialization practices were cultural socialization message, while Dominican, Mexican, and Puerto Rican parents reported that cultural socialization messages comprised 85% of their ethnic–racial socialization practices (Hughes, 2003). The emphasis on cultural socialization also increased if parents perceived more discrimination themselves or if they had a strong ethnic identity (Hughes, 2003).

Abstract

Socialization approaches and cognitive-developmental theory have provided two major approaches to studying moral development. Socialization approaches have focused on the development of conscience through guilt and internalized behavior, typically measured in terms of compliance, whereas cognitive-developmental theories have emphasized developmental changes in moral judgments and reasoning. While important differences persist, contemporary approaches have attempted to integrate thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and have stressed the importance of social interactions. The rise of evolutionary based accounts have led to more research with infants and studies incorporating neuroscience, furthering the understanding of the complex nature of moral development.

Socialization is the process by which children acquire the values, standards of behavior, attitudes, and skills that are viewed as appropriate to the culture in which the child resides. The family as the earliest and most pervasive socialization agent will be the focus of this article. To organize the issues, a family systems viewpoint, which emphasizes a variety of subsystems, including parent–child, marital, and sibling systems will be used. The following topics will be briefly covered, including mother–father differences in style of interaction, typological and parent–child interaction approaches to socialization, parents as advisors and providers of opportunities for social interaction. Marital and sibling relationships as contributors to children's development will be briefly considered. Determinants of family socialization strategies including child characteristics, social support, social ecological factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, SES), and ethnic background will be reviewed. The multidetermined nature of socialization will be emphasized by locating the family in a network of social influences.

1 Four Theoretical Perspectives

Socialization perspectives emphasize the unidirectional transmission of values from an older generation to a younger generation. Older models are based on psychoanalytic (Hoffman 1970) and social learning (Bandura and Walters 1963) theories and generally are limited to an analysis of dyadic parent–child interactions. In general, this approach focused on the products of value socialization to the relative neglect of the process of value socialization. The focus on parents has been on pre-existing parental behaviors, traits, and styles that are conceptualized as antecedents of children's socialization. The focus on children has been on outcomes conceptualized as passive conformity with socialization pressures or internalization of values. Such models have been much criticized by psychologists and sociologists because of their static, homogenious assumptions concerning the nature of society, and the passive and overly conforming view of parents to the previous generation and of children to their parents (Wrong 1961). More recent socialization perspectives (Grusec and Goodnow 1994) retain a focus on the parental role in socialization, but incorporate an interest in how parents accommodate to child characteristics, abilities, and motives in designing flexible strategies for transmitting values to children.

The cognitive developmental perspectives of Piaget and Kohlberg represented early challenges to the socialization perspective. These theories emphasized children's cognitive construction of values and children's sequenced development of their capacity for moral judgement. The parent's authoritative role in teaching values was de-emphasized and a greater focus was placed on the superiority of egalitarian peer relations in promoting moral development. More recent social domain theory (Smetana 1997) balances an interest in the child's activity in constructing values in different environmental contexts with an interest in how parents, among others, provide contextually nuanced, affective, and cognitive material from which children can construct their understanding of value systems in their social environments.

Early socialization theories acknowledged the importance of a positive parent–child relationship context in such constructs as parental warmth and nurturance that were considered to enhance the effectiveness of a parent's socialization techniques. In recent relational perspectives, the long-term parent–child relationship moves to the foreground as a primary source of parental influence. Maccoby and Martin's (1983) review of the research on parent–child interaction presaged many elements of a relational perspective on socialization. In contrast to earlier perspectives that emphasized parental discipline strategies they traced the origins of socialization to the beginnings of relationship formation during the first year of life. Research supporting the relational origins of children's co-operation include correlations with measures of maternal sensitivity during feeding, secure attachment, and measures of reciprocal parent–child responsiveness during play (Kuczynski and Hildebrandt 1997). The relational perspectives emphasize that far from having to be coerced into accepting parental values, children share a common relationship history with their caretakers that leads them to be receptive to parental influence and to adopt similar social goals.

Bilateral and coconstructionist perspectives are emerging integrative frameworks that incorporate concepts of bidirectional causality, agency of parent and child, and a changing cultural context into a comprehensive understanding of the process of value development (Kuczynski et al. 1997, Lawrence and Valsiner 1993). As with most new theories, these perspectives emphasize that values are actively constructed, or interpreted, by the child from the parental and cultural environment rather than transmitted passively unchanged from one generation to the other. What is distinctive is their explicit interest in the process of bidirectional socialization. For example, the bilateral model of parent–child relations (Kuczynski et al. 1999) focuses on relatively unexplored arenas of parent–child relations such as the constructions and strategic actions of both parents and children, power transactions, and relationship dynamics. These models also add complexity to the parental side of value development. They propose that the values that parents initially bring into the child rearing context also undergo change as the result of self-reflection, exposure to different and changing values outside the family, and the continual opportunities for problem solving and challenges that parents experience from their children during the lengthy process of childrearing.

Introductory Considerations

Socialization and social learning processes are crucial in shaping behaviors, including aggression and altruism. Through socialization within a particular culture, individuals acquire views as to what the world is like and the nature of ‘human nature’, adopt particular attitudes and values, and gain an understanding of the cultural meaning of events and behaviors. In any culture, socialization involves modeling and imitation, reinforcement and punishment, cognition and reflection, and such processes have direct influences on the development of aggressive, peaceful, altruistic, and egocentric attitudes and behaviors. Psychologists note that conditions which have been shown to be particularly relevant to the learning and continuance of aggressive behavior patterns, for example, are those in which aggression is reinforced, there are many opportunities to witness aggression in others, there are few opportunities for developing affective social ties with others, and the individual personally is a recipient of aggression. Longitudinal psychological studies show that both aggressive and prosocial behaviors tend to persist into adulthood once they are learned in childhood; in one study, individuals who behaved aggressively when they were 8 years old also tended to behave aggressively when they were 30 years old. The same intra-individual consistency also was found for prosocial behaviors such as sharing.

3 Socialization

The considerable variation in the activities typically carried out by men and women across socioeconomic structures and local conditions that we demonstrated in the preceding section emerges as societies actively construct social roles that people believe will enable them to prosper in their local society. The psychological and social processes involved are depicted in Fig. 2.1. One important aspect of these processes is that the preparation of boys and girls for their adult responsibilities requires that societies exert considerable effort to socialize children for their adult roles. If children were innately predisposed to engage in these roles, then parents, schools, and other adults would need to exert only limited socializing influence. Instead, human societies undertake elaborate socialization processes to shape boys’ and girls’ habits, skills, cognitive competencies, emotional tendencies, personality traits, and normative beliefs. As a result of this socialization, most children learn to function in the ways that women and men are defined in their society.