‘May be I’ll Need a Pair of Levi’s Before Junior High?’

Abstract

Changing schools at the age of 12 also represents a change in social age identity. Children prepare for this change of age identity in different ways, and their strategies vary across sociocultural contexts as well as between individuals. In this article, some of these strategies are explored through ethnographic observation and interviews with Norwegian 12-year-olds preparing and anticipating a change of school, making use of Robert Merton’s concept of ‘anticipatory socialization’. Merton’s concept describes the building of personal abilities, alienation from one’s former group and adaptation to new norms as social processes identifying change of social reference group. These terms are employed here to identify social processes initiating children’s orientation to a youth identity. The functions that material possessions fulfil are related to the ability to symbolically communicate both categorically and self-expressively a growing normative awareness and a sense of value.