Suchergebnisse

In recent decades, sociological research has investigated the nature of the school institution and its uneven effects on the progress of families, societies, and the global community. Yet, relatively little comparative research on schooling has dealt in a serious way with links between schooling and the other major contexts of childhood-families and communities. This edition of Research in the Sociology of Education speaks to the diverse contexts in which children function around the world, and to how these contexts shape school experiences and outcomes. The edition's authors are international

In recent decades, sociological research has investigated the nature of the school institution and its uneven effects on the progress of families, societies, and the global community. Yet, relatively little comparative research on schooling has dealt in a serious way with links between schooling and the other major contexts of childhood: families and communities. This edition of "Research in the Sociology of Education" speaks to the diverse contexts in which children function around the world, and to how these contexts shape school experiences and outcomes. The edition's authors are international and interdisciplinary. They offer a pastiche of perspectives on a single topic: how the non-school contexts of childhood interact with the school institution to advance modern and not-so-modern forms of virtue, merit, and attainment, in cultural context. This book offers qualitative and statistical portraits of children living in Asian and African countries. It links educational opportunities to the child's socialization. It urges social scientists and policy makers to consider a child's surroundings when modeling the modern school system. This book series is available electronically online.

One of the most seductive topics in recent years is the field of social capital - the webs of trust, mutual obligation, and cultural knowledge that flow through local information - that yield resources in human-scale associations of individuals. When we ask about the implications for children's learning and performance in the school institution, however, the construct quickly becomes slippery to hold. The 2001 volume provides five papers that offer empirical evidence on the nature and life of social capital across diverse ethnic groups and cultural settings. These fresh studies delve into the resources embedded in Latino and Asian-American peer groups, how immigrant parents' networks and norms variably push their children to achieve in school, and how teenagers' involvement in ethnic-rooted churches contribute social capital. The volume includes three commentaries, authored by David Baker, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, and Raymond Wong, and a review chapter by the editors.

Past studies examining the transition to adulthood within the Chinese context often implicitly or explicitly assume that the rural population is a homogeneous group and suggest that rural individuals tend to enter the workforce and marry at younger ages than their urban peers. This assumption overlooks the distinct challenges faced by rural youth, who often confront higher poverty risks and greater uncertainties compared to urban counterparts, yet empirical research on these unique challenges is limited. Using both a national survey and a unique longitudinal sample of rural youth in one of the poorest regions of China, this study demonstrates that rural youth experience a greater diversity of pathways from adolescence to early adulthood than do urban youth, which contradicts many earlier studies in Western contexts. In addition, this study identifies a variety of childhood environment factors that structure the transition pathways of rural youth. This study highlights the growing rural–urban disparity in China and has important implications for research on social stratification and rural youth development.

Fundamental changes in China's finance system for social services have decentralized responsibilities for provision to lower levels of government and increased costs to individuals. The more localized, market-oriented approaches to social service provision, together with rising economic inequalities, raise questions about access to social services among China's children. With a multivariate analysis of three waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1989, 1993 and 1997), this article investigates two dimensions of children's social welfare: health care, operationalized as access to health insurance, and education, operationalized as enrolment in and progress through school. Three main results emerge. First, analyses do not suggest an across-the-board decline in access to these child welfare services during the period under consideration. Overall, insurance rates, enrolment rates and grade-for-age attainment improved. Secondly, while results underscore the considerable disadvantages in insurance and education experienced by poorer children in each wave of the survey, there is no evidence that household socio-economic disparities systematically widened. Finally, findings suggest that community resources conditioned the provision of social services, and that dimensions of community level of development and capacity to finance public welfare increasingly mattered for some social services.