 When sociologists think about individuals, they do not think about personality or about the mind. They think about what is something called the self. The self is a little bit different than what psychologists talk about because it's really considered a social thing, a presentation, if you will, of who you are. When we also think about the self in terms of how we group people. So I wanna go over some terms to show you what the difference is in the way that we talk about groups of people and study people and study human interaction. So the first thing that term you should know is an aggregation. An aggregation is a collection of data about more than one person. So there are people who have things in common. For instance, female or a particular race or people born in Indiana or people under the age of 30. They have this in common, but they may or may not know each other and certainly don't think about each other as a group and yet collecting data on them as an aggregation can help us see patterns that become important in studying people and in their society. And this should be contrasted to something called a group category. So this group category is more than just an aggregation. It is people who have some understanding of who is in what group. So it's not just a bunch of people that were collecting data on and then we see after we've collected the data what they may or may not have in common, but rather we are essentially picking a group of people because they are defined as a group of people. And then when we look at that then we study them as a group of people. Now this does not require that group of people to think of themselves as being a member of that group. So for instance, most people in our society don't think of themselves as being the member of a particular social class or socioeconomic class. Sometimes people think of themselves as working class or middle class that they really are not identifying with that and they certainly don't have meetings for the middle class or get together or whatever. But it's still a good category to study and it still is a category that has a specific kind of understanding of who is in which group. The United States government has some very strict definitions on how to determine what socioeconomic level you're at or your household is at. So we wanna distinguish this more by saying that there are some groups which have affiliation. Now this is where you start having a kind of consciousness of belonging to a group where people, for instance, your classroom or this course is a group of people who have affiliated with each other by means of essentially joining the class, signing up for the class, and rolling in the class. So if I say to you, you're a social 101 class with a certain section number, you know who you are because you have formally joined that section. And so you still are a group category but now you have some understanding of belonging to that class. And then the last of these is something called category knowing. And that category knowing means that this particular group affiliation that you have or category that you belong in is something that's very important to you. For instance, a lot of people, gender is very important to them. They look in the mirror in the morning to make sure that they don't look too bunched or don't look too feminine. You know, there's a sense of belonging to a particular gender as being important to your sense of self. You are both, you know, you're in that group and that group is important to you to be in and you think about who you are in relationship to that group. So there are some categories that you know you belong to but you really don't identify with them. They don't become a part of how you think about yourself. And so they just are a group affiliation that you have but they are not necessarily that ultimate sense of I am a member of this group. So we wanna keep in, the reason I bring those groups to mind are that idea of how we think about things is because we wanna talk about two ideas here in this lecture. One is how people age and the other, which is closely related is how people do family. And of course, aging and family are connected with each other in part because we tend to think of particular familial relationships as being important at particular stages within our lives. And of course, this is culturally bound and can differ from culture to culture but it is still a concept that is often linked in our minds and also within sociological study. So we wanna talk about something called an aging life cycle. And I wanna put a little caveat here. In the past, we've talked about this sociologist meaning we have talked about this in a very sort of strict way like you have a certain stage in life that you go through and then you transition to the next stage of life and everybody does it around the same age and does it pretty much in the same way. We now recognize that that's sort of ethnocentric on the part of sociologists from the West that how people age differs from culture to culture and also differs from generation to generation and even from individual to individual within those categories. So I wanna talk about this in terms of these different stages but I want you to think that this does not necessarily one does not necessarily have to come after the other and that the way we talk about this is more a group category rather than a kind of category knowing in the part of the person who's doing aging. So anytime we talk about aging one of the things we talk about is when people are born and they have our membership in a certain kind of age cohort. Age cohorts are important and you probably know them better than you think you do because if you have heard the term millennial or baby boomer then you know what an age cohort is because it's essentially people born within a particular time period who is that who go through things within the history of their world around them that kind of hit the same historical event at the same time. In fact, age cohorts are interesting in terms of the sociological imagination because it is a way that we often connect to the bigger picture to you know the sociological imagination is connecting your biography to history and age cohorts are connecting your time of birth to the ways that you experience historical events. For instance, baby boomers all know where they were when JFK was shot and millennials all know where they were at 9-11. And you know so there's a kind of joint we experience this part of history at the same stage in our lives which can define a generation. And we have to be careful about this stuff because essentially people born around the same time can still experience life very differently depending upon what socioeconomic class they're in depending upon what their nationality and racial backgrounds are depending upon whether they're men or women or other genders or have different sexual orientations, et cetera, et cetera. So age cohorts is a nice little category to think about but we don't want to impose too much on that category when we're talking about people who are part of it. The other thing about it before I go on to childhood the other thing I want to just mention very quickly about age cohorts is that studying things with looking at the cohort as part of the study can sometimes show that things are changing. If older generations are still experiencing something like for instance a wage gap that younger generations are not experiencing then that can tell you that things may be beginning to change. So sociologists still use cohorts in a lot of their studies just because it's a good idea to check and see if there's a pattern based upon aging that is emerging that might give them a hint as to what's gonna happen in the future. Now when sociologists talk about childhood as opposed to psychologists we're not necessarily considering like childhood development and when we talk about socialization and we're interested in how children sort of take on the social norms of their world but really another way that sociologists to do that childhood is exactly how we define childhood and that believe it or not changes depending upon the historic period you're in depending upon what subgroup you're in what subculture you're in and also depending upon where you were born and what culture you're in. We've had a lot of changes in what we think about childhood in the last 150 years. For one thing we have far less children per parents than we used to and ironically when you have fewer children two things happen. One is that you think a lot more about the need to have a child and second that child becomes more important within the family. If you had told people in the 1850s that you're worried about whether you could afford a child or not they would look at you like you're crazy because the way that they kept the family going the way they kept the family business going and the farm or whatever was to have a lot of children. Children were economic assets. They were what helped feed everybody and helped perpetuate the family wealth and so forth. So you wouldn't think about them as having cost you anything because they were an investment and an asset that made the family survive help the family survive. But on the other hand because they had so many of them and because we have so few now there was not a lot of rhetoric around how to make their childhood better or treat them as somebody special. And there was a lot more teach them what the rules are teach them how to work hard get them out in the field as soon as possible kind of attitude where nowadays we worry about psychological development and we have self-help books to help us with parenting we worry about the impact on them and so forth and children are much more precious in the way that we construct them than we used to. This has created an entire industry but it's awesome sort of made us extend childhood to certain steps. Like we now require children to go to school until age 16 where it used to be just through sixth grade. And we also well we've extended childhood all the way out to age 26 now because you can still stay on your parents insurance out of the way to age 26. So when you become an adult it becomes difficult to define because there are things you can do when you're 16 there are things you can do when you're 18 there are things that you can do when you're 21 there are things that you can do when you're 24 and so forth and all of these things keep you connected to your parents. So making the end of childhood much later in life. And this is not true in every society this is different even within Western and European societies this is a different thing. America, the United States probably has one of the longest childhoods on earth. Most cultures and most places children take on adult responsibilities much earlier than they do in the United States. And we also have this thing called adolescence which you may think was you know I mean teenagers or people who are between ages 13 and 20 so hasn't there always been adolescence? And the answer is no it's really a 20th century invention in which the idea of the teenager as an important period in life became more prevalent. And even in probably might even argue that it didn't really come into full acceptance until the 1950s when we have the Bobby Soxers who you know are the teen angst movies and all of that kind of stuff and rock and roll and music and other kinds of commodities that are aimed at adolescence. So we have this idea of the adolescence and of course what goes with this is also definitions of when somebody commits a crime if they commit a crime before they're 16, 17, 18 years old then you know this is considered a time period when you're less responsible for what you do than when you're older and become an adult. So adolescence is a fairly new concept and it has brought with it a lot of new ideas and norms around what growing up means. And of course the next cycle stage would be adulthood and there are lots of ways in which every culture has sort of a rite of passage to adulthood. And like I said before, we have several that start at age 16 and work away all at page 26. So you might suggest that in most of mainstream culture here when you marry and when you have children is your entrance into adulthood. So that can happen at different ages for different people. And this is why there's a lot of debate around teenage pregnancies and around allowing the age of marriage and all of that kind of stuff because there are different ideas about when the normative time is to reach adulthood. And of course adulthood comes with personal responsibility and the idea that you're going to financially support yourself. And of course this can be quite difficult some families and among some people depending upon circumstances. So we do have, and of course we have this new thing now where in social media where people talk about having to take care of things as adulting and adulting is sort of a new idea of looking at what is like to be grown up. And these kind of trends are changing the way that people think about what is a child, what is an adolescent, what is an adult? Of course when we talk about adulthood we often very much talk about what are you gonna do when you grow up? What meaning, what kind of job are you gonna take? What kind of career are you gonna pursue? And usually when we talk about that people don't say, well when I grow up I'm going to be a factory worker. I'm going to be a garbage man or I'm gonna go off and work in an office all day long or work in a store all day long. Usually when people answer that question they answer it with a kind of career. And we have this idea and this is probably throughout Western culture that all of us have something that we were meant to do that's important to us and that's often called a vocation. And the word vocation really literally means voice of God, meaning that you've been called. And sometimes people will call it a calling. And for people who can't quite make money at their vocation they sometimes go off and make money in mundane kind of jobs but they have what is called an avocation. So you can think of vocation as career and avocations hobby but there's really more to it than that. It's a meaningful type of work that you do. So if your work is not meaningful the way you make money is not meaningful then you might do make enough money so that you can go off and do what you really enjoy doing what you really think is important and not have to make money at it. And of course capitalism and the way that our economy works can make different demands on adults where on the one hand they have to make money and they have to participate in the economy and that's impossible to do sometimes with some kinds of vocations. But it also you also have that pressure that you ought to be thinking about what you were meant to be. So this can lead to a lot of sort of disconnected conflicting demands upon adults. So the last stage we call old age or sometimes retirement so we're getting to old age and not retiring more often now. There's a couple of things I want to mention about how old age has changed and the way we think about old age. One is that there's a difference in the way that we are constructed in media now that old age is constructed in media. There's a good example of this when you think about the adult diapers that depends adult diapers. So adult diapers have been around for a long time because older people have become more incontinent with age but most of the time in the past when the advertising was done it was done in medical catalogs and that kind of thing. And if you read the ad it will tell you about the absorbency and how it reduces smell and all of these kind of functional kind of things. We now have advertisement on nightly television that are for adult diapers that show people dancing and like all commercials kind of implying that if you wear these diapers and go out dancing you're gonna get laid tonight. So the idea behind this is sort of an underlying this will improve your sex life which all advertising tries to tell you that if you buy their product you'll be more desirable. But this is a very different view of old age it's saying okay you've got, yes you're gonna have more physical problems as you grow older and so forth but you can still live an active and engaged life where in the past when we talked about old age we saw it as withdrawing from the social world so that you become more and more shut in less and less active and treated more or less as an invalid. And this is all well and good and I think it's probably a positive I don't think there's anybody who's saying we should tell people that they should just go away and not be part of the world but sociologists have also taken a look at how this can be detrimental to people who are experiencing more and more disability and more and more problems as they age there's kind of a pressure to hide that now and stigmatize that instead of recognizing that there is a decline in health. So it's a balancing act that we haven't quite figured out yet and of course the profit motive is in the middle of it so that makes it somewhat difficult to have that conversation sometimes. The other thing I want to mention is that one of the things that we're facing in this country is that the population itself is getting older and the reason it's getting older is that we're having less children and we're living longer and this is going to bring some problems in the future one of the problems that gets talked about a lot is social security because every day until 2030 10,000 more people are going to be eligible for social security as the baby boomer generation grows older and they're living longer so they're going to be needing that social security support much longer and you don't have as many young people coming up or some people arguing that'll be okay because we have more machines and so forth but there is one part of this and that is what's going to happen with housing. Housing is going to be a bigger and bigger deal because our houses are not built to be accessible in most parts of the country and there's this concept called aging in place that AARP and gerontologists have talked about where we need houses that make it easier for people to get in and out of and they have to use an assistive device like a wheelchair or a scooter or a walker or a cane and then we also need to have wider rooms, wider hallways, wider doorways and so forth to make sure that people can use as devices once they're inside the house. Now, why is this important? Well, it's important because it will cost a lot more money to put people who can't get in and out of their homes into special places like rest homes and assisted living places and so forth. So we're probably gonna have a pretty bad housing crisis within the next 10 or 15 years and we already are seeing some communities that are beginning to address this but it isn't as widespread as it should be and it will create more problems because the longer you can keep somebody in their house even if they're getting some sort of assistance to be in there, it is much, much less expensive than putting them in a home and most of the time that burden of putting them in a nursing home or putting them in an assisted living falls upon the taxpayer to pay for that because it's paid for through Medicare and Medicaid. So you're gonna see a lot more of gerontologists and aging researchers are looking at this as an important aspect of where we're going with aging and it's one that's not been talked about very much in the past. Also contributing to this is you're gonna have more people aging who do not have children to help take care of them because we have fewer and fewer couples who have more and more kids. We're gonna talk about that in a minute but those sort of factors are coming together to create a kind of crisis as we face retirement and old age and as the population, the average aging population grows older. So when we talk about the life course, I wanna mention this idea of life chances and the reason I wanna mention is because oftentimes what your life chances affect how you go through the life course. Like your childhood is gonna be much different if you're poorer than if you're richer or your adulthood is going to be much different so your retirement is going to be much different depending upon whether or not you have barriers that make it difficult for you to fulfill whatever potential you have. Our life chances sounds kind of like potential but it's not really just a kind of type of potential. Potential sort of psychologically suggests that that's internal so we use the word life chances because we're looking at sort of external things that prevent people from from getting what they need and living up to what they can't do. Each culture has an idea about aging and that means that they have different definitions of what childhood is, what adulthood is, what independence is, what old ages and so forth. And of course those cultural differences will affect how your life chances will work out. Of course, there are rites of passage that every culture has. Some of them are very specific and some of them are sort of implied in what you do. And we need to understand that individuals may or may not follow those courses. They may not go through those rites of passages. They may not age in the same way. They may take on adult responsibility sooner than most people do or later than most people do, depending upon what's going on with them. But one of the factors that shapes whether or not individuals follow this idea of how to age well is that there are inequalities that create barriers and that's what we're talking about. We're talking about life chances. Life chances means that in a just society people should have an equal opportunity and in most societies we do not. And if we do not have equal opportunities we will not age and create families in the same way. So going to the ideas of looking at families I wanna go over some terminology so that you can understand the difference when we do family research. One is that a household is different from a family. Household includes all the persons who occupy a housing unit as their usual place of residence. So this can include roommates and it could include temporary people who are coming and going and so forth. And there are people who are not officially a family because they do not marry and get a state. License in order to be that they still kind of occupy a household together. So there are all sorts of ways and of course individuals can become a household simply by living by themselves. So there's also ways that people live with each other and any way that they live with each other is considered a household if they're in the same place of residence. The housing unit is the place where they live a house and apartments, a mobile home, a group of rooms, a single room, any of that kind of stuff. Anything that's intended for occupancy and somebody lives there is a housing unit. Families on the other hand are people who are related to each other either by blood or by law and a family name or may not live in the same household. So families and households get, you know interchanged sometimes in popular discourse that for our purposes, we have very distinct definitions that are not the same. A household is about the housing unit, the usual place of residence and families are about these legal and blood relationships that people have with each other. So let's talk about what types of families exist. So everybody knows nuclear family and of course, most people, politicians, people in public discourse talk about the nuclear family as if it has been here forever, that this is exactly, you know, this is where all societies have been built and so forth. But the truth of the matter is a husband, wife and children living together in a single housing unit, making up a household, which is essentially what a nuclear family is suggesting has really not been a predominant form of household for more than like 50 or 60 years. Before World War II, we had something called the extended family. And this is how most people live. And if you wanna be truthful when we talk about the way society has been built in the United States, it was not built because of the nuclear family it was built because the extended family. The extended families, of course, are multi-generational more than just two generations. So you have grandparents, great-grandparents and living in the same household as parents and children, that you also have cousins and brothers and sisters that are adults who bring in their families and so forth. So an extended family can mean any set of relations that are grouping themselves together either because they live in the same household or they live in the same vicinity of each other. A lot of times in cities, extended families would live in the same apartment complex or high-rise building. And so they would be near each other and would interact with each other and people knew who their cousins were and hung out with their cousins often. Of course, the extended family is still important in a lot of subcultures in the United States. One of the culture shocks of visiting to Las Vegas was seeing Latino families that would have the entire family come to a grocery store or to do shopping or whatever. And you didn't see that where I grew up in Florida most of the time when people went out shopping as individuals or just adults. You know, like mom might have one of the kids that are kind of thing, but it wouldn't be husband, wife and children all going into a place and into the line at the grocery store and so forth. So obviously extended families and the way people do families can be very different depending upon the subculture where my family history comes from in West Virginia, my father's side of the family. I did, when I did my research in North Carolina, one of the things the nurses talked about was that when people from West Virginia came down to go to the hospital in Northern North Carolina, instead of just a couple of people from the family coming by and visiting the patient, if the patient was in the hospital from one at night or two, there would be an extended family that would show up and want to wait out until the person got better. And so they would often have to accommodate for 10 or 15 people because they all had come down to make sure that grandma or uncle or whoever was going to get better. Of course, this is not what mainstream, this is not the way that mainstream America would necessarily do with a hospital that most of the time in mainstream America, it's only one significant person who comes and stays at a hospital in somebody's ill and maybe not even that one, maybe they just come and visit a little bit and come back. So again, extended families has historically been important, but they all also remain important for a number of self-cultures within the United States. Closely related to that, but sort of a new idea, especially since the late 1970s and early 1980s with no fault divorce, they came the way on the land so that people found divorce easier to do as we have what is called blended families and blended families are basically when husband and wife have children and then they divorce and they go marry other people who have children, you have step brothers and sisters, you have half brothers and sisters and so forth, some of the children may live in one of the households for part of the year in a different household for another part of the year and they may be weekends in one household and weekdays in another. So this is a new way of doing family because these people are related each other legally and by blood because of the children that they shared and so forth. And for a while, there was not a lot of norms to turn to to tell you what to do when there was a blended family. And so they're even in legal cases that was hard to figure out exactly what would be the best course of action if you are faced with having to deal with step children and half brothers and sisters, that kind of thing. Now, it's been about 40 years and we now start having some norms like for instance, in court situations, the norm now is to try to go for joint custody in which both divorcing parents have some responsibilities and rights in relationship to that child and that's not considered an ideal and the best way to do it. And then if there is some challenge to that, that's where the burden of proof lies. And then of course, people have gotten better about caring about what the kid needs, the kid's need in those situations. And so there are a lot of self-help books. Self-help books are a good way to figure out what norms are being developed because there's essentially ways of training people how to deal with new things in their lives that they've not dealt with before. So the blended family is becoming much more prominent. Divorce is easier than it's been in the past, even with children. Child custody and child care has become more standardized and normalized and so blended families are now very much a part of our society and people don't think much about it anymore. It's not shocking and it's not hard to overwhelm, it's just a matter of working your way through it and there are lots of ways that will support you working your way through that. There's one other kind of family that I wanna talk about which is not really necessarily related to a household that it certainly generates a feeling of family for a lot of people. And this is something called fictive kin. Now, fictive kin has a very specific idea behind it and that's something called general exchange. So a group of people who think of themselves as family even though they don't have blood are legal relationships with each other. We know that they're fictive kin because they instead of exchanging goods and services on a one-to-one basis. So I babysit for you and then you babysit for me, okay? So we have this exchange, that's called a specific exchange but a general exchange would be that this say there's five people in the group and one of them babysits and the other one does the laundry and the other one does the car pooling and they don't necessarily have to exchange with each other as long as they're giving something to the group they can expect something back from anybody in the group. It doesn't necessarily have to be the person that they gave the service to or the resources to. So essentially it becomes a group that is bonded together because people exchange things back and forth within the group, demonstrating that they are part of the group. Couple of examples of fictive kin. One example would be street gangs and this is an important thing for criminologists especially to understand because most of the time when you have people who commit crimes together and by the way, I'm not implying that all street gangs or gangs are criminals or a lot of people who get together into kind of young people having general exchange with each other and creating what we might call a gang who do not necessarily go out and commit crime but looking at the specific criminal gang because they are mostly a fictive kin group instead of a bound by a criminal group. The rules are kind of different. If you have two or three people who get together and say we're gonna go rob people and they go and do it and you arrest one of them, it's very easy to say, okay, if you tell us about the other two then we'll let you have an easier sentence and you can turn them and get them to give evidence and go after the group that way but with gangs that have fictive kin relationships that's never gonna work. This is why oftentimes the only way to break up these kind of operations is to essentially go undercover because any other way, you're not gonna, there's too much of a sense of we're in this together. We belong to each other to get them to turn on each other. That would be not just a betrayal of the particular people that they might give evidence on but it would be a betrayal to the entire group and it would be considered betraying somebody, betraying a group that you belong to. Another example of fictive kin is traditional black churches in the South which very often have created general exchange systems that have supported all of the people who are involved in that church. And then you can look at the civil rights movement as being born out of this fictive kin system because a lot of the early, well, I don't wanna say early, early because there were a lot of civil rights before the 1950s but a lot of what we think of as the civil rights movement in the 1950s including Rosa Parks was born out of the ways in which black churches generated a fictive kin relationship among the people in the church. So it was very easy to organize them into political action because they were already organized in a fictive kin relationship. So one of the ways a sociologist study marriages and families is to collect data on them and specifically to look at trends. And I've put on your canvas shell a copy of the American's Families and Living Arrangements from 2012 and the US Census Bureau which is published by the US Census Bureau in August of 2013. The 2012 data really is the latest data and this is 2018 as I record this lecture that I can get a hold of right now. I'm sure that these figures are gonna change and we're probably gonna see a report like this within the next couple of years that we'll draw upon. But for right now, this is the data that we have coming out of the Census Bureau and taking a look at living arrangements. And one of the things, if you look at this, so first of all, you can see that between 1970 and 2012, there have been a lot of changes in households and in family arrangements. In 1970, 81% of all households were family households, meaning everybody that was in the household was related to each other either by law or by blood. That's found down to 66%. Married couples with children under age 18 and 1970, 40% of all households were that arrangement. Now it's down to 20%. Now the reason it's down to 20% can be single parent or it could be that the people who are living with the children are not married or it could be that there is something other than a parent living with the children under 18 because a lot of grandparents and aunts and uncles, foster parents and so forth. But that's still a significant that it's gone down and half since 1970. Also the proportion of one person household has increased by 10 points going from 17% to 27% of all households now have just one person now. And the number of people per household which is related to the fact that there's a lot of more one-person households has gone down from 3.1 to 2.6. So the one thing that I wanna point out here is that most of the time when we think of family and when we think of a household we see in our head heterosexually married couple with children under the age of 18 but that really is only 20% of the household. So that's not typical, right? This stereotype that we have in our head is not actually the typical household in the United States. We don't have a single household type of household that we could call typical. We have a lot of different ways in which people live together. And so that's an interesting disconnect between the way people think about what a household is and that gets reflected sometimes in the way that our tax laws talk about it our politicians talk about it and so forth and the way that we actually live with each other. The way we live with each other is different. So if you're living alone or you don't have children you might consider the status sort of comforting that you are nowhere near like an outlier. There are plenty of people who are living similar arrangements to the way that you're living. And then finally, I want to mention that there is a huge variation in the way in which people marry nowadays. This is very different than it was in the past. And if you look, this is a Pew research graphic that is telling us that in some of the places in the United States and you'll see the red circle shows that Southern Nevada and Las Vegas is definitely one of these that people report this is people reporting enter marriage meaning they marry somebody with a different race or ethnic background than their own is making up quite a few of the household. 25% of all newlyweds in our area or 25% or more are marrying somebody of a different racial background. This probably includes more Hispanic and non-Hispanic than any other group together but it certainly includes all different kinds of arrangements. So this is what we call exogamy and I've mentioned in class and in other materials before that exogamy is on the rise. And this shows you that it's not uniformly on the rise everywhere but it's definitely we live in an area where that it's definitely on the rise here. And of course, the fact that people come here and get married, I'm not sure if this is anybody who's married here or if this is households who are here. So we have to be a little bit careful about the data it may be skewed to higher because people come here to get married but they don't end up living here. But this is certainly a big change in the way that people do marriage. It's not that many years ago. I think the last laws that changed were in the 1960s and 70s that was actually illegal to marry somebody of a different race in some states in this country. So this is definitely going from you can't do it to 25% or more of you are doing it is a big shift in the way that we do marriage.