Grounded in social structure and personality, life course, and status attainment perspectives of social psychology, the Youth Development Study (YDS) has followed a cohort of teenagers from the beginning of high school through their mid-thirties. Evidence for the effective exercise of agency derives from diverse adolescent work patterns leading to…

Emotion research demonstrates that problems of theoretical interest or practical significance are not divided neatly along disciplinary boundaries. Researchers acknowledge both organic and social underpinnings of emotion, but the intersections between biological and structural processes can be difficult to negotiate. In this article, the authors…

The scene of urban desolation and social despair captured by the cover picture of 63rd Street, one of the ghostly thoroughfares transecting Chicago's collapsing black ghetto at century's close, invites everyone to reflect on the link between the built environment, social structure, and collective psychology. More precisely, it points to the need…

Because inequality is one of the central concerns of sociologists, it has been addressed, in various ways, by virtually all of the major traditions of sociological social psychology--social structure and personality, symbolic interactionism, and group processes. For those who work in the social structure and personality tradition, inequality…

To explain how interpersonal behavior in relational contexts usually reproduces but sometimes modifies macro structural patterns, I outline a conceptual framework within which to understand existing theories and evidence and to develop new ones. Actors create and enact structure by means of several types of shared cultural schemas ("ordering…