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Objectives. Following up on Bourdieu's (1973) model of reproduction and DiMaggio's (1982) model of mobility, I determine whether there are socioeconomic differences in the academic benefits provided by adolescents' use of free time.Methods. I analyze the associations that students' uses of time have with mathematics achievement test scores and grade point averages, using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 and OLS regression models.Results. Time spent on school‐sponsored activities is associated with improved math test scores, while time spent on social activities is negatively associated with them. School activities are more beneficial for students in the bottom SES quartile than in the top two SES quartiles.Conclusions. Limited support is found for the mobility model; however, lower‐SES students are more likely to engage in activities such as television watching and videogame playing that are associated with lower test scores and grades, and higher‐SES students are more likely to participate in beneficial school‐sponsored activities.

We perform a content analysis of twenty marriage and family textbooks published between 1950 and 2000 to study how the voluntarily childless are presented in undergraduate courses. Throughout the time period studied, independence, pursuit of a career, and romance were prominent themes in the representation of voluntary childlessness. Other themes emerged specific to each decade—the 1950s portrayed parenthood as a challenge, while the 1990s concentrated on alleviating negative stereotypes of the voluntarily childless.

Although numerous studies have confirmed the separate effects of economic and cultural capital on arts participation, research focusing on the cumulative and interactive effects of economic and cultural capital through the creation of taste publics is limited. Using data from the United States (Survey of Public Participation in the Arts [1982–2012]), this research integrates economic and cultural capital—measured as income and education—into the analysis of taste, creates taste publics, and examines their association with highbrow arts participation over time. We find that the effects of economic and cultural capital on highbrow arts participation decreased between 1982 and 2012, and American publics seem to have converged across both types of capital. Implications of the findings are discussed.

In this essay, we argue that Whiteness is intrinsic to Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, yet it remains unmarked within U.S.-based sociology of education research. As a result, these studies treat race as a tangential issue as opposed to a structure that is foundational to how society is organized and functions. We disrupt this unmarked relationship between Whiteness and cultural capital by (1) reviewing Bourdieu's work on race, class, and cultural capital, and the application of these concepts in U.S.-based research; (2) examining the educational field as White institutional space and the concerning consequences of conflating cultural capital with Whiteness; (3) discussing the implications for a research framework embedded in a class-based master narrative; and (4) offering suggestions about how to disrupt Whiteness in cultural capital research, including emphasizing the racialized dimension of the habitus, taking an institutional approach and by taking a race-conscious approach to knowledge production in sociology.