Sociology
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Item Connecting Spaces: Gender, Video Games and Computing in the Early Teens(Sage, 2023-04) Ashlock, Jennifer; Stojnic, Miodrag; Tufekci, ZeynepInformed by evidence that computing attitudes may be uniquely constructed in informal contexts and that the early teens are a key period for academic decision-making, we investigate lines of practice that connect computing skills, attitudes, and videogames. We compare the relationship between computer skill, computer efficacy, and activities associated with gaming using a data set of 3,868 children in middle school. The time that children spend gaming has very modest association with skill and efficacy. Accounting for the frequency with which children modify games, engage in social gaming activities, and the salience of gamer identity explains the gender gap in computer skill and significantly narrows the gender gap in computer efficacy. We find support for the argument that computer skill and efficacy are dependent on children connecting often isolated social contexts, a socially embedded characteristic of the digital divide.Item PLATONIC CO-PARENTING: A NEW LENS INTO THE UNFINISHED GENDER REVOLUTION(2024) Reddy, Shilpa; Chuang, Julia; Madhavan, Sangeetha; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the extent to which platonic co-parenting (PCP), an alternative family form in which parenting is separated from romantic relationships and often also from coresidence, is creating and sustaining gender egalitarian parenting relationships. In other words, how gender egalitarian are these parenting partnerships? Using 32 in-depth semi-structured interviews with men, women, non-binary and trans people, who were at different stages of the PCP journey, I investigated the practice of platonic co-parenting by focusing on the motivations for people to choose the PCP path to parenting; and how they navigated gendered patriarchal norms in the process of becoming PCPs including division of household labor. I found two broad categories of people who were drawn to PCP: those who attempted to subvert hegemonic, heteronormative ideals of family and parenting; and those who attempted to reproduce these ideals. The subverters aspired to form gender egalitarian and equal partnerships whereas the reproducers desired/imagined the mother as the primary parent and the father’s role being closer to a sperm donor’s—a father figure as opposed to an involved father. Among the subverters, the realities of the division of labor once they had a child turned out to be far less gender egalitarian than they had intended as the pull of traditional gender norms was quite strong for both men and women. PCPs engaged in gendered boundary work to separate aspects of their family that fell in the transactional realm and those that fell in the intimate/sacred realm free of monetary or other exchanges. Framing certain activities (childbearing, breastfeeding, relocation, and parental leave) as intimate had the unintended consequence of creating inequality between the male and female co-parents. By using the language of altruism to naturalize their arrangements, PCPs intend to be seen as “real” families while leaving in place traditional cleavages of the gendered division of labor.Item “You're biracial but…”: Multiracial socialization discourse among mommy bloggers with Black and non-Black multiracial children(Wiley, 2022-06-30) Reyna, Chandra V.Objective This study examines thematic content and discourse surrounding multiracial socialization between Black and non-Black multiracial families on multiracial mommy blogs. Background Mommy blogs have been recognized as a medium through which mothers challenge dominant representations of motherhood, create community with other mothers, and seek out advice. But little is known about how mothers write about and discuss race, racism, and multiracial socialization online. This study addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing how a niche of bloggers—mothers to multiracial children—construct narratives surrounding race, multiraciality, and multiracial socialization online and how their narratives differ by the racial makeup of the blogger's family. Method Using a MultiCrit framework, this study analyzes 13 mommy blogs written by mothers of color with multiracial children. Blogs were analyzed for thematic content related to race, racial identification, multiraciality, and multiracial socialization. Results The findings demonstrate that mothers' orientations to multiracial socialization vary depending on whether the blogger has Black or non-Black multiracial children. Bloggers who are mothers to Black multiracial children blogged frequently about their engagement in safety socialization, whereas mothers with non-Black multiracial children did not. Conclusion The stark difference between thematic content from bloggers with and without Black multiracial children highlights the differing experiences among Black and non-Black multiracial people, for mothers of Black multiracial children, and the implications anti-Black racism has on family processes.Item Mothers as Agents of Social Change in the Movement Against Sexual Violence(2023) Drotning, Kelsey J.; Cohen, Philip N; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines how the #MeToo movement is changing generational understandings of sexual violence. Through this research, I examine how sexual violence is both a cause and a consequence of systemic gender and race inequality. Using eighteen in-depth semi-structured interviews of mothers with at least one child aged five-years or older, I investigate three sets of questions. First, how are mothers evaluating their own experiences with sexual violence post #MeToo movement? Second, how is sexual violence part of mother-child conversations about sexual behavior? Third, how do mothers; social location contribute to how they feel about the #MeToo movement and how they teach their children about sexual violence? My findings suggest mothers are transmitting new understandings of sexual violence to their children. Specifically, mothers are teaching their children that appropriate touch, sexual or nonsexual, cannot be determined using a binary yes or no standard of consent. Their approach to sex education is driven by their own experiences with sex that was violating and/or nonconsensual and consideration of their own and their children's social location. Overall, my findings demonstrate the #MeToo movement and other associated events have ushered in a change in mothers' rape consciousness which is facilitating change in children's sex education. If successful, mothers will have contributed to decreased prevalence of sexual violence as these children age into adolescence and adulthood.Item Inequality in the College-to-Career Transition: Self-Scarring and Underemployment(2020) Dernberger, Brittany Noel; Kleykamp, Meredith; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A recent college graduate working as a coffee shop barista, earning minimum wage and carrying thousands of dollars in student loan debt, is a familiar trope in conversations about the value of a bachelor’s degree. In the college-for-all era, young people are encouraged to attain a bachelor’s degree to bolster their labor market opportunities (Rosenbaum 2001), yet 42 percent of recent college graduates, and 35 percent of all college graduates, are working in jobs that do not require a college degree (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2020). The American Dream posits that individual perseverance will lead to increased economic security. Young people invest in college as a pathway to a good job. Why does a degree not equally benefit all graduates, and how do graduates respond when their college investment does not pay off? I employ restricted-access Monitoring the Future panel data (1976 – 2015) and interviews with 60 recent college graduates to examine how college graduates transition from school-to-work, and how they respond when it does not go as planned. I contribute to studies of underemployment scarring by extending the context from workplace consequences to individual decision-making, unpacking how and why young people make choices related to their post-graduation employment outcomes. By examining how graduates engage as students and connecting that to post-college employment outcomes, I illustrate how graduates self-scar by making choices that diminish their ability to quickly translate their degree into a good job along three dimensions: 1) not engaging in outside-the-classroom activities during college, which are critical for career exposure and career-relevant skill-building; 2) downshifting job expectations in response to underemployment; and 3) making labor market choices that elongate underemployment. However, graduates’ decisions are not made in a vacuum, and preexisting inequalities – in economic resources, first generation student status, and social and cultural capital – are often perpetuated in the wake of underemployment. Graduates often blame themselves for their lack of labor market success. This project illuminates how inequality is replicated during the college-to-career transition through graduates’ self-scarring decisions and contributes to our understanding of who can achieve economic mobility through returns on a college education.Item INEQUALITY AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY(2018) Pepin, Joanna; Sayer, Liana; Cohen, Philip; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Intrahousehold finances offer a window into the crossroads between the market domain’s emphasis on self-reliance and the family domain’s emphasis on interdependence. Modern couples confront tensions between ideals of mutual family interests and values of individualism, a departure from fitting themselves into culturally expected family arrangements of the past. How these social changes impact progress towards gender equality is not well understood. The dissertation aims are to: (1) identify mechanisms associated with different types of money arrangements in families, and (2) examine the association between financial arrangements and gender inequality in families. To meet these aims, I used data from two sources. First, I used multinomial modeling of 2012 International Social Survey Programme data to show cohabiting couples in countries with greater gender equality partially integrated their money instead of keeping it separate. Married couples pooled money regardless of country-level gender equality. Findings suggest that different cultural logics operate in married and cohabiting partnerships across gendered contexts, rather than cohabitation functioning as a weaker form of marriage. Second, I devised a novel survey experiment to collect the first nationally representative sample of U.S. adults’ attitudes about income sharing in families. Results challenge the notion that marriage distinctively encourages support for financial integration in families. Findings also revealed that respondents believed higher-earning partners ought to hold back a greater absolute value of their earnings for personal use, allowing inequality in labor market rewards to perpetuate unequal conditions within families. I also used this data to disentangle the mechanisms associated with perceptions of decision-making authority. Findings indicated higher relative-earners within families were not regarded as entitled to the final word in decisions. Whether respondents considered earnings individually or community owned did not explain the lack of association between relative earnings and decision-making clout. Instead, findings showed a significant association between the fictional decider’s gender and respondents’ perceptions of fairness. Specifically, when women were presented as the decider over monetary family choices, unilateral decision making about monetary items was viewed more favorably. Collectively, these findings suggest gender socialization theories are essential to explaining persistent gender inequality in families.Item Intersecting Inequalities in the Paid Care Work Sector Under Changing Social and Economic Contexts(2018) Sun, Shengwei; Chen, Feinian; Yu, Wei-hsin; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on the expanding paid care work sector as a key terrain for examining labor market inequalities in the United States and China, with three papers attending to different aspects of social stratification. In the U.S., men’s presence in care work jobs remains rare despite the fast job growth in education and health care and the decline in traditionally male-dominated manufacturing sectors. Despite growing public interest, little is known about the reasons and pathways of men’s transition into care work jobs. The popular discourse attributes men’s reluctance to a matter of gender identity, whereas scholars adopting a structural approach argue that men have little incentive to enter care work jobs mainly because those jobs are underpaid. The first paper examines how well the structural and cultural approaches, respectively, explain why men enter care work jobs or not. Moreover, care work jobs have been increasingly polarized in terms of pay and job security since the 1970s, and the polarizing pattern of care work job growth is characterized by racial disparity. Is such pattern driven by racial disparity in education and labor market experience, and/or by racial discrimination? The second paper addresses this question by examining the changing determinants of entering into low-paying versus middle-to-high-paying care work jobs between two cohorts of young men who joined the workforce under different labor market conditions. Findings suggest a persisting logic of a racialized “labor queue” underlying the changing patterns of racial inequality. In the context of urban China, the transformation from a centrally planned socialist economy to a profit-oriented market economy has ended welfare-based, life-long employment in the cities, and fundamentally changed the social organization of care. The third paper examines how care workers fared in terms of earnings relative to non-care workers since the early 2000s and the factors contributing to the earnings disadvantages of care workers. Taken together, this dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of intersecting inequalities by gender, race, and class in the paid care work sector under changing social and economic contexts.Item Self-Presentation Styles, Status, and Influence(2016) Baxter, Amy R.; Lucas, Jeffrey W; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examined effects of individual self-presentation styles on influence in groups. Perceived competence and social acceptance both play a role in determining how much influence group members enjoy. Aggrandizing and deprecating self-presentation styles may affect perceived competence, social acceptance, and ultimately influence. I predicted that aggrandizing self-presentation would lead to perceptions of competence and that self-deprecation would lead to social acceptance. The anticipated strength of those trends, however, was unclear, and I proposed that they would vary depending on status. I conducted two studies designed to assess whether aggrandizing or deprecating self-presentation styles lead to differences in influence outcomes for high and low-status individuals. In Study 1, participants gave feedback and a promotion recommendation for a fictitious (male or female) job candidate based on employee evaluation information presenting the candidate as either deprecating or aggrandizing. The main findings from Study 1 were that aggrandizers were rated as less likable than deprecators. No other predictions were supported. Study 2 was an online experiment in which participants made hiring recommendations in reference to résumés from fictitious applicants that varied by race, gender, and presentation style (aggrandizing, deprecating, or neutral). Results provided some evidence that low-status candidates were punished for using aggrandizing self-presentation strategies. The results of the studies suggest no one- best technique for self-presentation and that there may be costs for aggrandizing or deprecating depending on race and gender.Item The Motivations and Experiences of Mexican Americans in the U.S. Marine Corps: An Intersectional Analysis(2012) De Angelis, Karin Kristine; Segal, David R.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As one of the largest and fastest growing minority groups in the United States, Mexican Americans are reshaping the major institutions of American life, including the military. The Mexican American military population, although still underrepresented when compared to their presence in the American population generally, is a growing ethnic group. Although growth is occurring across the services, Mexican Americans have a large presence in the U.S. Marine Corps, a trend unlike the military behavior of African Americans, the next largest minority group in the military. This trend holds for both Mexican American men and women, even though the Marine Corps is the most combat-oriented of the service branches and the service branch with the lowest proportion of occupations open to women. Using an intersectional approach and through in-depth interviews of Mexican American men and women serving in the Marine Corps, I examine the personal characteristics, motivations, and experiences that are associated with the decision to join the Marine Corps. I argue that Mexican American Marines, regardless of gender, share common motivations for service grounded in the intersection of their common ethnicity and socioeconomic position. However, while the majority of respondents were drawn to the military because of occupational considerations, I also argue that they felt a connection to the Marine Corps because of its more institutional nature, which intermeshed well with their own individual values. I also compare the experiences of the respondents while in the service. In regard to ethnicity, the majority of respondents discussed the large number of Hispanics in the Marine Corps, even as they noted stratification in the population. They did not view themselves as a minority, but as a population growing in size and influence. These commonalities decline with the application of an intersectional analysis, as gender becomes the most salient and divisive characteristic. Despite their diversity, the women were considered a unified category and as a token population, their proportions shaped the group culture in predictable, visible ways. I conclude by discussing how lived experiences are not only shaped by one's social characteristics, but by the social institutions in which one operates.Item "Priestesses Unto the Most High God": LDS Women's Temple Rituals and the Politics of Religious Identity(2011) Kane, Nazneen; Hill Collins, Patricia; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study enters into broader debates surrounding the study of women in traditional religions by examining the ways in which LDS women utilize temple ritual in the ongoing production of religious identity. In-depth interviews with eighteen LDS women are explored to highlight themes in LDS women's perspectives regarding temple rituals. I demonstrate that LDS women's perspectives on these ceremonies reveal that LDS women draw from an amalgam of competing dominant, alternative, and oppositional discourses to define their religious experiences and identities. These self-definitions revealed that the women in this study drew from ritual symbols, gestures, images, and dialogue to shift normative definitions of LDS women as mothers who bear and raise children to more expansive identities as "priestesses unto the most high God." I argue that examining the practices of women in traditional religions reveals hidden layers of their experiences, identities, and ways of knowing.