Sociology

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Start date: 2020Subject: search.filters.subject.gender

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    Connecting Spaces: Gender, Video Games and Computing in the Early Teens
    (Sage, 2023-04) Ashlock, Jennifer; Stojnic, Miodrag; Tufekci, Zeynep
    Informed 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.
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    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.
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    “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.
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    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.
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    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.