You are on page 1of 3

A Conversation with Robert Crosnoe

BY ANDREA LAM

NORTON SOCIOLOGY

Q: For many researchers, their biography has shaped or influenced their research interests. Is that the case for you? What initially drew you to the study of children and adolescents, especially with regards to their education? I totally agree with your assessment about the link between biography and research in sociology, or any social/behavioral science for that matter. We study what we know to some degree. Some people call that me-search, and it can get out of hand, but I do think that it is also what keeps us passionate about what we do, our connection to it. For me, the story is complex. I actually had no interest in studying children and adolescents, or education for that matter, when I first started graduate school at Stanford in the mid-1990s. Instead, I wanted to study gender inequality, especially issues of discrimination and sex segregation in the workplace. So, how did I move away from that and toward studying children and youth? Well, it was a very practical decision. I needed to funding for my graduate studies and my time as a teaching assistant ran out, and a sociologist in my department (the great Sandy Dornbusch) offered me a job on one of his research projects. That project was about adolescent development within schools. That is how I got into this field initially. Of course, I would not have stayed in it if I did not soon realize how fascinated I was by the social worlds of young people and how much I thought that cultures of American high school were ripe for sociological study. Turns out that what I ended up doing was what I probably wanted to do all along, but it took a very practical consideration (paying rent) for me to see that. Q: In your first book, Mexican Roots, American Schools: Helping Mexican Immigrant Children Succeed (Stanford University Press, 2006), as well as in a number of your articles, you focus on the educational experiences of Mexican and Latino immigrant children. What drew you to study these communities in particular? I came to this issue as a sociologist when I was an assistant professor, but this was one area where my personal history had me heading in that direction all along. I grew up and went to college in one traditional immigration destination (Texas), went to graduate school in another (California), and lived for another two years in a state (North Carolina) often cited as the exemplar of the new immigration state. As a result, I had lived my whole life around Mexican immigrants and their children, yet not because of the false cultural divide that often separates the White middle class from the rest of the population. So, there was something inside of me that made this topic fascinating to me. When I came back to Texas to start my job and to study education and schools, I, of course, was confronted by the fact that the education of Mexican-origin youth, especially English language learners, was perhaps the most pressing and contentious issue facing the public education system in the state, both a great challenge for schools but also a fantastic opportunity. Here is an interesting observationalthough sociologists have long studied immigration, the Latino/a population, etc., the focus has primarily been on adults and adolescents. Young children were relatively understudied, even though they represented the fastest growing segment of the Mexican-American population and even though preschool and early

Find us on Facebook: Norton Sociology

Follow us on Twitter: WWNsoc

Subscribe to our channel: NortonSoc

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Independent and Employee-owned wwnorton.com/soc


-1-

education has become one of the major foci of education policy. When I started studying Mexican immigrant youth, I began by looking at adolescents in high school, but I quickly recognized the need to move down the life course and down the educational system to study children in preschool and early elementary school. As a result, my work on the children of Mexican immigrants is what led me into early childhood research, which is what I have concentrated on in recent years. Q: In your most recent book, Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education (Cambridge University Press, 2011), you discuss the effects of social marginalization and bullying on high school students. Why do you feel that it is important to study the influence of bullying on educational development? Bullying certainly seems to have become one of the great issues of our time, and I feel gratified I have been able to contribute to our understanding of this issue, which, because it happens in and around schools is an educational issue not just a psychological one. Still, I cannot say that I set out to study bullying. What happened was that I had done a series of articles, using quantitative methods, that revealed that young people often did worse academically than you would otherwise expect when they did not look like their fellow students in school, in terms of race, body size, social class, academic skills, etc. In trying to figure out why this was the case, I decided to totally change gears and go into qualitative research, spending a great deal of time in a high school here in Austin. I simply wanted to know what was going on socially in schools that would get a student off track academically, even when that student was academically capable and had academically oriented friends. This inquiry led me in many different directions, but one of the endpoints was bullying. Interestingly, I found that despite what we see on TV and on the web about outrageous acts of bullying and aggression in high schools, most of the social stuff that goes on in high school is more subtle, covert, hiddenoffhand remarks, snubbing, backhanded compliments, wordlessly giving looks of disapproval in the hallways. This kind of stuff really hurts. It gets under your skin and messes with your mind, and it becomes a preoccupation and makes you doubt yourself. So, yes, physical aggression is a major concern, but so is a lot of that stuff that does not look like bullying at first glance. I think that bullying is only one of many things that seems to be non-academic but can have academic consequences and, therefore, should be the concern of educators striving to meet academic accountability measures. It is about school health, of course, but also about school performance. Q: In Fitting In, Standing Out, you find that girls are 57% and boys are 68% less likely than their peers to attend college if they experience feelings of not fitting in. How do you account for the difference in percentages of college attendance between the sexes? In this book, I conducted a large amount of statistical analyses using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a representative sample of American youth. I wanted to be generalizable and to take into account the many factors selecting youth into social problems in high school that could also affect their academic progress. I also did a first-pass of identifying the mechanisms underlying these patterns, and I then used the qualitative analyses of data from my local school ethnography to go even further in that regard. Basically, the story is that feedback from peers (including, but not limited to, bullying) can lead young people to believe that they do not fit in socially in school, feelings that can create identity crises and conflicts (i.e., other people do not see the good in me, I am not who others want me to be) that are very painful and discomfiting. Because American youth are so agentic and believe they control their own destinies, they often try a variety of methods for coping with these feelings. Some of these coping responses seem sensible in the short-term, in that they reduce the hurt, but are highly problematic in the long-term; for example, cutting class, substance use, devaluing school and the people in it, accepted others negative opinions of ourselves. These responses can interfere with the accrual of the kinds of high school academic credentials (e.g., grades, valued course credits) that are increasingly necessary for getting into and staying in college. Although this complex process does differ in some ways by gender, social class, and race, it is more similar than different across groups.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Independent and Employee-owned wwnorton.com/soc


-2-

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Crosnoe, Robert. 2011. Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education. New York: Cambridge University Press. Crosnoe, Robert. 2006. Mexican Roots, American Schools: Helping Mexican Immigrant Children Succeed. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Q: Youve spoken about themes and depictions of bullying in contemporary popular media such as television. For example, Glee recently did a high-profile storyline focused on Kurt Hummel, an out gay high school student who is forced to transfer to another school because of the intensity of the bullying that he suffers at his original school because of his sexual orientation. What are your thoughts on the effects of these storylines on children and adolescents who experience or have experienced social marginalization or bullying for whatever reason? One cannot underestimate the power of external validation. Much like the It Gets Better campaign, seeing yourself and your experiences on TV or the movies or in a book (e.g., Thirteen Reasons Why) can be empowering in a way, certainly affirming. It is good to know that one is not alone. I do think that young people are far more savvy about the media than we give them credit for (maybe more so than we are), but, at the same time, they need to know that people get them and that people, especially adults, hear them. In some ways, the media serves that role. Q: What would you say to college students who are just starting to take sociology courses or are majoring in sociology? Today, college students tend to view higher education as a vocational path more than as an intellectual journey. Given the circumstances, I am OK with the practical career focus as long as we not lose side of how intellectual pursuits and discussions support the practical career-building steps. Sociology is everywhere around us, and you cannot do your job wellany jobwithout understanding the self, society, and the connection between the two. This Interview has been condensed and edited.

ROBERT CROSNOE is Professor of Sociology and Elsie and Stanley E. (Skinny) Adams, Sr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

B W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, the oldest and largest publishing house owned wholly by its employees, strives to carry out the imperative of its founder to publish books not for a single season, but for the years in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, college textbooks, cookbooks, art books and professional books. For more information please visit wwnorton.com/soc.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Independent and Employee-owned wwnorton.com/soc


-3-

You might also like