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This volume of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth showcases the timely and important work of active, early career sociologists, who are helping to define the direction of the sub-field. Their work shares basic premises and concerns, and these underlie and provide cohesion to this diverse collection of chapters. Children and youth are active agents in their own “socialization,” producing meaning and action collaboratively with their peers, and they struggle for agency and control in various social contexts – these are the themes that, both explicitly and implicitly, shape essentially all of the contributions. The underlying concern of our own introduction above, and of many of the chapters, is that the current processes and practices may stifle children's creativity and undermine their potential to collaboratively construct innovative solutions to societal problems.

David A. Kinney is professor of sociology at Central Michigan University. He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University at Bloomington, completed postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago and worked as a research development specialist for the U.S. Department of Education in Philadelphia. His primary research areas are sociology of adolescence and sociology of education. He has published articles and chapters on children's time use, adolescent peer cultures, and education in venues such as Sociology of Education, Youth and Society, American Behavioral Research Scientist, and The Praeger Handbook of American High Schools. He is past president of the Michigan Sociological Association and elected council member of the American Sociological Association sections on Sociology of Children and Youth and Sociology of Education. He became series editor of this volume in 1999 and has been series co-editor with Katherine Brown Rosier since 2004.

Volume 14 of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (SSCY) is comprised of empirical research and theoretical papers within three areas, namely children's well-being, children and youth peer cultures, and the rights of children and youth. In this volume, the term “children” is used inclusively to encompass those from infancy through the transition to adulthood. These empirical studies include children's voices and experiences from four continents and a range of methodological and theoretical orientations. Additionally, a clear connection to social policy is made in many of these studies. Altogether, these studies highlight how structure and culture both limit and enable the life chances of children, how children interpret and construct their social relations and environments, and finally, how children view themselves as well as how others view the rights of children.

Purpose – To examine how youth appropriate and resist elements of the developmental discourse as they construct and enforce dating norms.

Methodology – In 2007, we conducted participant observation at a middle school summer camp for youth in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Youth ranged in age from 11 to 17 years old.

Findings – Youth borrowed the idea of a normative sequence of behaviors arranged by age from the developmental discourse to establish a set of age-appropriate dating norms for all campers, regardless of chronological age. Youth enforced these norms by treating other dating actions as too young or too old. By tying this linear trajectory to social age instead of chronological age, youth creatively altered the apparently rigid developmental discourse and established dating norms which addressed their own values and concerns. Youth established dating norms and maximized opportunities for pleasurable, collective discussions about dating and romantic relationships. Although the developmental discourse influenced the norms in this peer culture, we argue that the small, heterogeneous composition of the camp facilitated youths' ability to appropriate, refashion, and resist the developmental discourse.

Loretta Bass, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Connecticut in 1998. Dr. Bass focuses her research on children and stratification issues in West Africa and the U.S. For her dissertation, Working for Peanuts: Children’s Work in Open-Air Markets in Senegal, she collected and examined both qualitative and quantitative data of child workers and their families. Dr. Bass lived in Senegal from 1994 to 1996, and completed follow-up research in Senegal during the summer of 2000. Her chapter in this collection draws on this research. Her research has appeared in the Population Research and Policy Review, Political Behavior, Anthropology of Work Review, and the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.Marilou C. Legazpi Blair is the Assistant Director of Institutional Research at Erie Community College. She received her Ph.D. from Penn State, and has performed a substantial amount of research on issues of child development. Aside from her interests in adolescent status attainment, she has also studied the impact of immigration on both adults and children in the United States. She is currently involved in an examination of adults who return to school for the continuation of uncompleted degree work.Sampson Lee Blair is an Associate Professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo. As a family sociologist, most of his research to date has focused on family relationships, and particularly those between parents and children. More recently, he has been involved in studies of justice issues within the familial context. He recently completed his term as editor of Sociological Inquiry, and is scheduled to be a co-editor of Social Justice Research next year.Sally Bould is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware with a joint appointment in the department of Individual and Family Studies. She has published numerous articles in the area of the family, family policy and poverty policy. Another article on this research concerning families and neighborhoods will appear in the 2003 Journal of Family Issues. She is the author of the book, Eighty-five Plus, which examines issues of state and family responsibilities for the oldest old and several articles on the oldest old population in the United States, including disability, caregiving and living arrangements. Currently she is a member of the board of The Carework Network.Tiffani Chin recently finished her Ph.D. in Sociology at UCLA. Her dissertation examined how children’s peer cultures intersect with the schools’ social, academic, and evaluative objectives to influence children’s educational experiences. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar with the Middle School Transition Study, studying oppositional culture and students’ transition from elementary school to middle school. Chin is the author of “‘Sixth Grade Madness’: Parental emotion work in the private high school application process” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, April 2000) and a co-author of Tutoring Matters: Everything you ever wanted to know about how to tutor (Temple 1999).Amitai Etzioni is the first University Professor of The George Washington University. He served as president of the American Sociological Association from 1994 to 1995, was Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979 to 1980, and was guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978–1979. From 1958 to 1978, he served as Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, a Communitarian quarterly. He is the author of twenty-one books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Next: The Road to the Good Society (New York: Basic Books, 2001), The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), and The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 1997 Tolerance Book Award.David A. Kinney received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University-Bloomington and did post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan. His publications have appeared in Sociology of Education, Youth and Society, Personal Relationships During Adolescence (Sage), and New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (Jossey-Bass). He is currently conducting ethnographic research with children and their parents in a study of how families manage work, home life, and children’s activity involvement in a fast-paced society.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She holds a doctorate (1976) and a master’s (1973) in sociology from Brown University and a B.A. (1971) in sociology and history from the University of North Carolina. She has published over ninety articles and book chapters in medical sociology, public health, medicine, and health services research. She has authored or co-authored fifteen books, on topics such as the social and economic impact of coronary artery bypass surgery, the federal role in health policy, public versus private models of service delivery in several different human services areas, controversial issues in health care policy and schools and child health services. Her current research interests include health policy issues, especially access to health care and child health care issues, and research on preventive aspects of health care.Yun-Suk Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is completing his doctoral dissertation on the role of familial relationship in the effect of performance of household tasks on subjective outcomes for children and married people. His research includes comparing several measures of time spent on housework, and studying about changes in working time. In the fall of 2002, he became a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute.Anna B. V. Madamba is a Research Associate at TIAA-CREF in New York City. With a doctorate in demography, most of her research interests are in the field of educational attainment and performance. Her current research involves the examination of the academic performance of children of single mothers.Kimberly A. Mahaffy is Assistant Professor of Sociology. Her research interests are gender, transitions to adulthood, and adolescent sexual risk taking. She recently edited a special issue for the Journal of Mundane Behavior entitled Mundane Sex. She teaches statistics, research methods, social psychology, social problems, and a senior seminar in gender and adolescence at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.Sarah H. Matthews is Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. Her current research focuses on the everyday lives of children whose mothers are in a drug treatment program. Her earlier research in the sociology of aging has appeared in gerontology and family journals. Her research on relationships among members of older families is reported in a forthcoming book, Sisters and Brothers/Daughters and Sons: Meeting the Needs of Old Parents.Kathleen M. Mathieson is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She holds a master’s degree in Sociology from ASU. Her research interests focus on medical sociology, including concerns of aging, child health and mental health as impacted by work and family conflicts. She has published on the maintenance of functional independence for the elderly, and has presented papers on this topic as well as on child health and child health policy issues.Meredith Phillips is Assistant Professor of Policy Studies and Sociology at UCLA. Phillips’s research focuses on the relationship between social inequality and academic success. Her current projects include a mixed-method study of the academic achievement of college students at a highly-selective university, an ethnographic study of the development of oppositional culture during students’ transition from elementary to middle school, and a statistical study of the distribution of school quality nationally. Phillips is the co-editor of The Black-White Test Score Gap (Brookings, 1998).Katherine Brown Rosier is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University. Her recent book, Mothering Inner-city Children. The Early School Years, was published in 2000 by Rutgers University Press. Other publications have appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Human Development, The Journal of Comparative Family Studies, and several other journals and edited volumes. While continuing to write on experiences of low-income African American children and families, she is also conducting research and writing a book with colleague Scott L. Feld on Louisiana’s Covenant Marriage.Barbara Schneider is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the Co-Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work. Author of several books, articles and monographs, Dr. Schneider is concerned with encouraging the cognitive and social development of America’s children by reshaping the responsibilities of families, schools, and society. Most recently Dr. Schneider has completed two books, The Ambitious Generation: America’s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless, and Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work. In both works she discusses how adolescents develop attitudes, skills and expectations about their adult careers.Kimberly A. Scott, Ed.D. is Assistant Professor in Hofstra University’s Foundations, Leadership, and Policy Studies department. She specializes in sociology of education, sociology of childhood, and qualitative research methods. Her research interests include examinations of race, class, and gender influences on the social and academic self-development of elementary school students. She has publications in Equity and Excellence, Journal of Negro Education, and Childhood: A Global Journal of Childhood Research. Currently, she is co-authoring a Rowmann and Littlefield book with Sarane Book entitled, Sociology of Children and Childhood.Linda J. Waite, Ph.D. is the Lucy Flower Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work at the University of Chicago, where she also directs the Center on Aging. She is past Chair of the Family Section of the American Sociological Association and Past President of the Population Association of America. Her current research interests include the working family, especially dual-career couples with children and the impact of job characteristics on parenting. She is also interested in the role of the family at older ages in functioning of individuals, intergenerational transfers and exchanges, and employment. She has published widely on the family, including an award-winning book with Frances Goldscheider, New Families, No Families: The Transformation of the American Home. Her most recent book, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially, with Maggie Gallagher, won the 2000 book award from the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education.