Sociological Research Online

In this paper we discuss the importance of taking an historical, intergenerational approach in sociological research. Lives need to be understood in the contexts of particular times and places. The backcloth to our discussion is the contemporary disruption of many young people's life course transitions from education to work in Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean countries but also among some young people in the UK, the main focus of the paper. We discuss two concepts and debates that have attracted attention in social science and the public domain. One concerns the designation of unemployed young people as a ‘lost generation’ and the other relates to assumptions about ‘intergenerational conflicts’. These concepts are prone to ignore the historical specificity of the contexts in which and to which they are applied. They also take those contexts as impervious to political intervention. In short they serve to uphold a rhetoric of inevitability about the present economic, political and public policies relating to young people and intergenerational relations. In order to demonstrate the importance of historical context on young people's transitions to adulthood, using a life course biographical approach we analyse an empirical example of a father and son taken from an intergenerational family study conducted in the UK. In this case we also adopt an historical intergenerational lens to show how young people's transitions are supported by other family generations and are thus not individualised pathways to adulthood.

The Changers are seven British men who have experienced upward mobility in their lives. A vast body of quantitative insights into upward mobility exist. Yet the qualitative, experiential dimensions of upward mobility are understudied; especially in relation to the lives of upwardly mobile males. This article presents an empirically rigours corrective that qualitatively outlines the Changers’ upwardly mobile existences and views. In particular, this article examines how sections of the mass-media have produced a didactic notion of ‘middleclass’ masculinity which the Changers feel compelled to replicate in their everyday lives, largely via the men consuming specific, expensive commodities. Attention is drawn to the anxieties which the Changers endure because of their social mobility and associated attempts to qualitatively appear ‘middleclass’.

This article seeks to consider, in an exploratory fashion, the relationship between happiness and memory. Both of these areas of investigation are relative newcomers to sociology, and have rarely, if at all, been studied in tandem. The article draws upon data from qualitative interviews with British adults that formed part of an empirical study of people's experiences and perceptions of happiness. In doing so, it suggests that people identify their memories and reflections on the past as sources of happiness in two interrelated ways. Firstly, people - particularly those of an older generation - make sense of life in the past as happier than that of the present. This is the case with regard to society in general as well as to their personal lives specifically. The ‘past-situated social identities’ of older people are considered in relation to this. Secondly, adults of a range of ages understand reminiscing about the past as something from which happiness or pleasure could be gained. Life course transitions, and the way in which adults make sense of and live through these, are key in the way in which people express nostalgia for, or idealization of the past. Reconnecting with the past can be regarded as a ‘technology of the self’, or a technique that people perform on their own minds, in order to enable themselves to feel happier. The article ends with a consideration of the implications of this for the ways in which happiness is theorized sociologically.

Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity remains a pervasive influence in critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM). However as Connell and Messerschmidt note, one of the key drawbacks of the approach is that it lacks an adequate theory of ‘social embodiment’. Subsequent authors have explored how masculinities entail bodily control and regulation but this often reproduces the Cartesian divide between mind and body that CSMM is highly critical of. On the other hand, poststructuralist critiques often see the body as entirely constructed through discourse, undermining the problem of gendered, embodied experience. This article suggests that literature on affect is a means of moving between these two approaches in order to see masculinities as corporeally experienced through power relations, but ultimately not entirely reducible to them. Drawing on 6 life history case studies from a larger research project, the article demonstrates how ‘learning to be affected’ by music is an embodied process which relies fundamentally on learning physiological experience through social interaction. This highlights the potential for both re-producing and transforming gendered performances and offers a new theoretical framework for conceptualising masculinities in the field of CSMM.

Talk about music, broadly understood, is commonly conducted and regarded as a neutral or transparent window on its topic. However, both vernacular and formal-analytic scholarly accounts constitute music as morally significant, and in doing so, articulate particular narratives of the social. One such contextual frame of reference for talking about music is presented and described here as ‘art vs. commerce’. A close analysis is conducted of a sentence in a recent academic paper (with attention to its conceptual buttressing in antecedent texts), and of the opening of a research interview with a musician, so as to show how contemporary articulations of this framework operate, and to demonstrate that vernacular and sociological forms of such thinking are contiguous, and can be taken as analytical objects in their own right. The intellectual and cultural mechanics of this moral work conducted by the articulation of art vs. commerce are highlighted and evaluated. The argument is not that such forms of talk or writing about music are to be ‘cleared out of the way’ so that music can finally be attended to, but rather that these forms of talk serve to constitute the fields of meaning within which music is understood.

This article takes a brief look at the manner in which African American females in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have been studied over the years. Noting that this group faces challenges due to gender and race, research has not always presented their struggles and successes from both a sociological and psychological view. Socialization theory has yielded a great deal of information despite the socialization process being driven by those in charge of the structure by which a person progresses through the STEM fields. Acculturation theory provides a glimpse of how African American females in these aforementioned fields progress from their perspective. Acculturation framework is of value because it parallels the emotional, cognitive, and behavior patterns students take as they progress through graduate school in order to become colleagues of the very professors that taught them. The framework considers the effects of the person's previous background and experiences, their coping skills and tactics, which are important to the success of African American females. Another common dynamic across the theory of acculturation and the experiences of these women is choice and the freedom to choose their own acculturation patterns.

This paper uses a reflexive approach to consider the opportunities and challenges of using a visualisation tool in qualitative research on social networks. Although widely used to map social networks over many decades, particularly in health studies and psychology, network visualisation tools are less common in qualitative sociological research. While recent trends in Social Network Analysis (SNA) have tended to concentrate within the quantitative domain, our paper is influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in network research, and aims to respond to calls for more exploration of how social ties are constructed and represented in qualitative research. Having used a target sociogram to visualise the networks of highly skilled migrants, we reflect critically on how this tool, far from being a neutral data collective device, influences how networks were described, explained, and perceived by participants. Focusing on the dynamics within the interview encounter, especially in the context of ‘researching up’, we explore participant reactions, what we learned and might do differently, next time. We conclude that, despite certain limitations, the sociogram helped mitigate the abstract nature of some topics by connecting them to specific groups of people drawn on the diagram. The tool not only enhanced participants’ reflection process but allowed certain topics to emerge which might have not otherwise surfaced, hence greatly contributing to the collection of rich data. Nonetheless, as we discuss, there are also ethical issues associated with its use.

This paper explores the contributions of sociology (and overlapping disciplines such as anthropology, social policy, and cultural studies) to happiness scholarship from the Enlightenment through to the present day. Pre-20th century thinkers whose work led to the formation of social science tended to take the theme of happiness seriously as a central challenge of social scholarship. Over the past century, sociologists have made important contributions to understanding happiness, although its absence from textbooks, encyclopedias, and conferences suggests that happiness has never been a major theme in mainstream sociology. The discipline's role in happiness scholarship could be greatly strengthened through more systematic and explicit approaches, especially in qualitative research. These will doubtless be developed soon, as sociology catches up with the other social sciences (most notably psychology and economics) that have already made great progress in convincing general publics and politicians that something so elusive as happiness can be analysed and assessed in robust and illuminating ways. A ‘happiness lens’ is recommended as a way of making sociology more transparent regarding its contributions to understanding and promoting good societies and good lives. This lens complements pathologism with positivity; insists on empathic effort to respect first-person subjectivity; and promotes holism and lifecourse perspectives.

In this paper, I investigate the role of the non-Amish midwife in Amish society. Conventional research on the Amish has overlooked the role the midwife plays in the structure of the Amish community, given that midwives who serve the Amish are not members of the community they serve and are not themselves Amish. Despite their status as outsiders to Amish society, I draw on ethnographic data collected during a two-year study with a non-Amish midwife to argue that the non-Amish midwife provides Amish women and men access to knowledge about sex and sexuality, provides them resources such as books and condoms, and shapes the structure of Amish society through these channels. Her power is clearly demonstrated in her ability to broker access between the Amish and non-Amish worlds, and her fingerprints on the community she serves exist long after she has caught a baby. So while the non-Amish midwife has largely remained invisible when viewed from conventional analyses of Amish society, I suggest that her position on the margin between Amish and non-Amish society is worth considering. As an analytic category, this position ‘neither fully part of Amish society nor fully extricated from it’ has something to offer studies of community power within the field of Sociology and augment future studies of Amish society.

This paper provides a constructive critique of the work on the Office for National Statistic's Measuring National Well-being project. Recalling Adam Smith's work on happiness highlights how the work in this project, as well as most of the dominant work in the field remains based on an economic utility model of well-being, failing to distinguish between individual- and aggregate-based levels of analysis and continuing to postulate well-being as a form of utility that essentially is the outcome of market interactions only. Using data from the first wave of Understanding Society , this paper will investigate the appropriateness of the approach empirically. A breakdown of the variation in life-satisfaction shows that ranking a split of the UK into 36 regions has little meaning, as there is hardly any variation of life-satisfaction at the regional level. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), an alternative way of engaging with the cross-regional analysis is presented.

In this paper we centrally explore the ‘sociogenesis’ of the concept of happiness: the social processes by which it came to be a term appropriated by different practitioner communities - from policy makers to academics, from a burgeoning self-help industry to advocates of positive psychology. Our core focus is upon shifting historical understandings of the term and how these relate to more general social processes. Our aim in this paper is not to present a definitive history of happiness, but rather something of the overall direction of changes in dominant approaches to, and understandings of, happiness particularly within what we might broadly term ‘the human sciences’. Ultimately, we offer a series of tentative reflections upon the implications of a developmental approach to happiness for sociological analyses of this increasingly popular area of concern.

This article explores the recreational time of parents with young children and the ways it can influence practices reconciling work and family. The aim is to examine the internal dynamics and the emotional side of family life vis-à-vis parents’ time structures. Children's organised and spontaneous activities have received scant attention in work-family studies and this lack of conceptual development around the quality of time use is unfortunate, if we take the work-family interaction to be more than the sum of strategies aiming at balancing both domains.

In this analytical framework special attention is then placed on play and on the activities parents set up with children during their recreational time. We find that especially play and loosely structured recreational time becomes important for parents because this time strongly characterises their home experience and through it they construct emotional bonds with their children. In this research, the concepts of ‘parent-initiated play’ will be introduced and used to find that play and activities with children are linked to asymmetric gender practices of care and bonding. The dual nature of parents’ time with children is considered crucial in understanding the construction of family life and the strains around the work-family interaction.

Fieldwork is wrought with challenges and emotional obstacles. Techniques of dealing with these logistical challenges are well discussed in the literature; however, rarely are the emotions involved in fieldwork explored, nor are the specific techniques for dealing with this emotional fallout. In this paper, I explore not only the emotions of fieldwork, specifically as a woman in a male dominated research setting, but actual tactics for dealing with these feelings - tactics I call ‘flanking gestures.’ Flanking gestures are techniques that allow the researcher to blur and stretch their gender, which I suggest provides a certain amount of emotional relief in the field.

This article examines what can be the contribution of Sociology to the ‘new science of happiness’, and what can such happiness studies contribute to Sociology? It does so by presenting the example of a quantitative analysis of European Social Survey data for the UK on social capital and life satisfaction by age. It reveals heterogeneity in the relationship between social capital and SWB by age with, for instance, socialising being more strongly associated with SWB among younger and older people compared to a mid-age group. Using this analysis as a case study, the first aim is to illustrate how sociological theory can crucially enrich research on SWB by relating the under-theorised field to broader narratives. While a range of empirical findings on the correlates of subjectively reported happiness have been dutifully collected over decades, solid theory building has often been neglected. It is crucial, however, to draw the various pieces of evidence together in order to formulate viable theoretical frameworks. Sociology is a science rich in useful approaches for the study of well-being. Role-identity theory as well as socialisation theory allow us in this paper to develop testable hypotheses for well-being data and give the research field a much-needed grounding. At the same time, it is demonstrated in this article how analysing data on life satisfaction can deliver much needed empirical tests of and new perspectives on long-standing sociological theories. For instance, the unresolved debate about homo sociologicus and homo economicus as competing conceptions of man can gain new perspectives from data on SWB.

The hedonic view on well-being, consisting of both cognitive and affective aspects, assumes that through maximizing pleasurable experiences, and minimizing suffering, the highest levels of well-being can be achieved. The eudemonic approach departs from the concept of a good life that is not just about pleasure and happiness, but involves developing one-self, being autonomous and realizing one's potential. While these approaches are often positioned against each other on theoretical grounds, this paper investigates the empirical plausibility of this two dimensional view on subjective well-being. The interrelations between common measures such as the General Health Questionnaire, the CES-D inventory of depressive symptoms, the satisfaction with life scale and the eudemonic CASP scale are examined in a confirmatory factor analysis framework using the third wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). A multidimensional structure of well-being, distinguishing cognitive, affective and eudemonic well-being, is shown to be the best fitting empirical solution. This three dimensional second order structure is neutral to gender in its measurement. A lower influence of feeling energetic on self-actualisation, and of somatic symptoms of depression on affective well-being was noted for respondents in the fourth age () in comparison to respondents in the third age (). These small measurement artefacts underline that somatic symptoms of later life depression should be distinguished from mood symptoms. Two main social facts are confirmed when we compare the different forms of well-being over gender and life stage: men tend to have a higher level of well-being than women, and well-being is lower in the fourth age than in the third age. Although the three measures are very closely related, with high correlations between .74 and .88, they each have their specific meaning. While affective and cognitive well-being emphasize the use of an internal yardstick to measure well-being, the eudemonic perspective adds an external dimension. As each measure has an own story to tell, we advocate the use of these multiple assessments of well-being.