Four main stages of age groups
- Childhood
- Youth
- Middle age
- Old age
Statistics to back up social age construction
- Only 59% of people didn’t experience age discrimination in the workplace in a recent survey.
- 41% of old people interviewed reported experiencing some form of age discrimination in the workplace
Rites of Passage
One reason that age is considered to be socially constructed is that passage vary between different societies and cultures
Legal age limits
- Smoking = 18
- Sexual intercourse = 16
- Responsible for wearing a seatbelt = 14
Initiation with ant bullets
- To become men in Amazon Satere Mawe Tribe, boys as young as 12 have to wear ceremonial gloves filled with stinging bullet ants.
- Each ant packs neurotoxins that cause pain 30 times more agonizing than the sting of a common wasp.
- Must wear the gloves 10 minutes 20 times
Land diving
- Tiny south pacific Island of Pentecost, boys as young as 5 engage in a tradition that can be described as bungee jumping
- Jump towers as high as 100 feet up in the air with vines tied around their ankles
- Whole point is that jumpers head must touch the ground
Blood Initiation
- Papua New Guinea, Matausa Tribesmen believe in order for timid boys to become brave men and attract women, they have to expel the contaminating female blood from their mothers.
- In order to do that they undergo brutal bloodletting rituals that involve shoving canes down their throats, sharp reeds up their nostrils and sharp arrows into their tongues
Childhood
- Can be seen as socially constructed
- Seen as innocent, dependent and vulnerable in the UK
- Children are portrayed as little angels or as little devils in the media
Parsons
That in all societies childhood is a period when socialisation into society’s culture take place. He states that children learn the norms and values associated with different social roles.
What did Parson believe in the family two main functions?
- Primary socialisation of children
- Stabilization of the adult personalities of the population of society
What did Parsons argue
That adolescence is a time when children begin to develop independence from their parents. For a smooth society it is vital that children develop independence from their parents
How does the media portray youths
Represent youth negatively, they may amplify their deviance and create moral panics about “the youths today”.
How does the media portray youths according to Griffin?
- Dysfunctional
- Suffering a deficit
- Deviant
McRobbie and Garber
“Bedroom culture” to describe the way girls spend their leisure time with their peer group in their bedroom. They are socialised into traditional gender norms
Sewell about young African Caribbean boys
Membership to a peer group may not be the only way to gain a sense of identity and status for young black boys: to belong to the group may mean adopting the norms of the group.
Suggests that young black Afro Caribbean boys often have no high achieving career aims or goals and therefore reject school.
Willis
Suggests working class “lads” often have no career aims or goals and rejected school because they see it as irrelevant to them and the manual labour jobs they end up with
Brannen
Researched informal care responsibilities and roles and suggested that for many people, middle age is a time when they shoulder many caring responsibilities. Not only caring for children, but also for elderly parents for middle ages identities
What is a pivot generation
Refers to the idea that middle aged people carry the responsibility of caring for their children and their parents so they swing between the two
What is a dual burden?
Refers to the idea that caring for both children and parents is a double responsibility
How might media reinforce middle age identity?
Through targeting them through advertising as they are the group with the highest disposable income
Saunders study on consumption
Suggests that those who satisfy their needs through ownership of various goods are influenced heavily by advertising and the media. Media targets middle age as they are the group with the highest disposable income and they define their identity by what they own
One way peer groups may create and reinforce middle age identity is through association with groups…
With specific shared norms and values
Hodkinson
Says that although looks and styles are important parts of subcultures, a primary feature of a subcultures, this sense of belonging could continue into middle age
What did Hodkinson study?
Goths.
He argued that a level of commitment to the Goth scene, and friendship groups and identity that develop around being a Goth, can result in social lives that “are so intertwined that it would feel very odd to leave it”
