What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children's…

In this article we examine how social capital affects the creation of human capital. Specifically, we study how college students' peers affect academic performance. Building on existing research, we consider the different types of peers in the academic context and the various mechanisms through which peers affect performance. We test our model…

Conventional social mobility research, which measures family social class background relative to only fathers' characteristics, presents an outmoded picture of families--a picture wherein mothers' economic participation is neither common nor important. This article demonstrates that such measurement is theoretically and empirically untenable.…

A causal model that explains variations in individual judgements concerning the fairness of equality or inequality, based on a new Index of Evaluated Equality, is proposed. (Author/AM)

Thirty-five studies examining the relationship between social class and crime/delinquency are reduced to comparable statistics using as units of analysis instances where the relationship was studied for specific categories of age, sex, race, place of residence, data type, or offense. Findings from 363 instances are summarized and patterns are…

As social and economic stratification between black and white Americans persists at the dawn of the twenty-first century, disparities in educational outcomes remain an especially formidable barrier. Recent research on the black/white achievement gap points to a perplexing pattern in this regard. Schools appear to exacerbate black/white disparities…

An examination of the quantitative importance of differential fertility in the current United States population for occupational distributions. Implications of such differentials for racial differences in occupational achievement are addressed as well as the problem of assessing the potential contribution of family planning programs to improving…

Occupational Changes in a Generation surveys of 1962 and 1973 were reanalyzed to discern patterns of intergenerational and intragenerational mobility of Black men. Support was found for Wilson's contention that class has superseded race as the main determinant of Black's occupational chances--particularly for men employed within the public sector.…

Considers whether the resolution of methodological criticisms of self-report research will result in greater consistency between self-reported and official data on race and class distributions of delinquent behavior. Suggests that prior self-report measures may not have been sensitive enough to capture theoretically important differences in…

Argues that "schools symbolically redefine people." The social organization of schools is a major symbolic index of the kind of socialization that has occurred and thus legitimates the conferral of specific status rights. Organizational characteristics are thus causally linked to the social meanings attached to university attendance. (Author/JM)

This analysis updates a previous 1958 review of literature on socialization and social class, drawing on more recently published studies and a secondary analysis of a national survey. It is suggested that although various studies have found a statistically significant relationship between social class and the use of corporal punishment, this…

This critique points out problems in the methodology used by Robinson and Bell in their analysis of societal differences between the United States and England and makes suggestions about future investigations. (EB)

Results from an analysis of the 1973 National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey indicate that (1) there have been sizable changes in the value of self direction since 1969; (2) social class remains the primary determinant of self-direction values; (3) relatively more emphasis should be placed on education in explaining social class…

Argues that the Wrights' conclusions must be viewed with a skeptical eye because: (1) they do not understand the significance of the gap between the thesis they claim to replicate and the data they bring to bear; (2) they ignore some significant analyses; and (3) their methods of analysis, and even their sample, are much less comparable to those…

Argues that their paper is almost entirely programmatic: It attempts to indicate roughly how much we can expect to know about parental values for children once we know all there is to know about their relationship to social class; how much more might be known if similar efforts were expended on other factors; and what lines of inquiry these…