scholarly journals Life Chances Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Barry Godfrey ◽  
Pam Cox ◽  
Heather Shore ◽  
Zoe Alker

Chapters 6 follows the children out of the institutional gate and into adulthood. It draws on rich personal evidence created through the ‘licence’ (or early release) system as well as census, military, employment, criminal justice, and local press records to track their subsequent journeys through life. The chapter focuses on the experiences of the majority who—to our knowledge—desisted from further offending. This group might be described as adolescent-limited offenders. The factors that seem likely to have contributed to their ‘successful’ reintegration are examined, and there is consideration of what that ‘success’ may have meant in terms of wider life chances and social mobility.


Author(s):  
Xiaorong Gu

This essay explores the theory of intersectionality in the study of youths’ lives and social inequality in the Global South. It begins with an overview of the concept of intersectionality and its wide applications in social sciences, followed by a proposal for regrounding the concept in the political economic systems in particular contexts (without assuming the universality of capitalist social relations in Northern societies), rather than positional identities. These systems lay material foundations, shaping the multiple forms of deprivation and precarity in which Southern youth are embedded. A case study of rural migrant youths’ ‘mobility trap’ in urban China is used to illustrate how layers of social institutions and structures in the country’s transition to a mixed economy intersect to influence migrant youths’ aspirations and life chances. The essay concludes with ruminations on the theoretical and social implications of the political-economy-grounded intersectionality approach for youth studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110201
Author(s):  
Thomas A. DiPrete ◽  
Brittany N. Fox-Williams

Social inequality is a central topic of research in the social sciences. Decades of research have deepened our understanding of the characteristics and causes of social inequality. At the same time, social inequality has markedly increased during the past 40 years, and progress on reducing poverty and improving the life chances of Americans in the bottom half of the distribution has been frustratingly slow. How useful has sociological research been to the task of reducing inequality? The authors analyze the stance taken by sociological research on the subject of reducing inequality. They identify an imbalance in the literature between the discipline’s continual efforts to motivate the plausibility of large-scale change and its lesser efforts to identify feasible strategies of change either through social policy or by enhancing individual and local agency with the potential to cumulate into meaningful progress on inequality reduction.


1997 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 593
Author(s):  
William E. Sedlacek ◽  
David E. Lavin ◽  
David Hyllegard
Keyword(s):  

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yeheskel Hasenfeld ◽  
Mark A. Chesler

The authors juxtapose autobiographical accounts of their personal and professional lives to examine the interplay of their personas and work in the social sciences. Chesler is an action researcher and change agent who focuses primarily on young people and their parents and on those providing them human services. Hasenfeld is an academic who focuses primarily on relations between clients and human service providers and on the systemic changes needed to improve these relations. They share domain assumptions, particularly a belief in the “good” society based on justice, social equality, and respect for diversity, are committed to improving the life chances of the oppressed and disadvantaged, and believe that empowering the clients of human service agencies is crucial to improving the effectiveness and responsiveness of such organizations.


2000 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Latimer

When older peoples' troubles are categorised as social rather than medical, hospital care can be denied them. Drawing on an ethnography of older people admitted as emergencies to an acute medical unit, the article demonstrates how medical categories can provide shelter for older people. By holding their clinical identity on medical rather than social grounds, physicians who specialise in gerontology in the acute medical domain can help prevent the over-socialising of an older person's health troubles. As well as helping the older person to draw certain resources to themselves, such as treatment and care, this inclusion in positive medical categories can provide shelter for the older person, to keep at bay their effacement as ‘social problems'. These findings suggest that contemporary sociological critique of biomedicine may underestimate how medical categorising, as the obligatory passage through which to access important resources and life chances, can constitute a process of social inclusion.


2000 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-233
Author(s):  
Stephanie W. Hartwell

Teens involved with drugs and engaged in delinquent behavior lessen their life chances. This article examines the relationship between early illicit drug exposure, delinquency, and subsequent adult experience through the life history accounts of 31 men who are homeless drug addicts today. The men's retrospective reports link personal history and social circumstance to describe common pathways associated with and emerging from adolescent delinquency and drug involvement. Their accounts, framed within the social development model, indicate that the life chances of teens at risk might improve if policy-based solutions and interventions target and ameliorate contextual and interpersonal risk factors interfering with the accumulation of social capital.


1983 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline M. Royce ◽  
Irving Lazar ◽  
Richard B. Darlington

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