Life is What Happened When Making Other Plans: Cultural Processes of Emerging Adult Life Trajectories

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 22. Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

The cultural processes of establishing adult lives are increasingly complex. Numerous macro-structural factors have caused changes to achievement of traditional social markers of adult stability, contributing to a lack of clear pathways into adulthood. Extant studies find the result is a new, distinct life stage known as emerging adulthood that entails a renegotiation of cultural norms regarding education, occupations, relationships, and socioeconomic life trajectories. The American public’s fascination with concepts such as “failure to launch” imply a rather simplistic dichotomy between emerging adults who successfully navigate paths to stable adulthood and those who do not. However, the disjointed and complex nature of emerging adulthood suggests this is too narrow, limiting understanding of actual emerging adult life trajectories and the implications they have for reproduction of social inequality. To more adequately assess cultural processes of adulthood and it social inequalities, this paper investigates emerging adult narrative accounts of obstacles encountered with achieving desired educational, occupational, and relational goals. Data are from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). The NSYR is a longitudinal, nationally representative, random sample of initially-teenage survey respondents and in-depth interviews with a subset of survey respondents tracking into emerging adulthood. Data for this paper primarily draw on the fourth wave of in-person interviews collected in the summer of 2013 when participants were 23- 27 years old.
Results indicate the “normal” of emerging adulthood is a range of unsettled and unequal states in which cultural focus on flexibility and transition obscures profound inequalities.

Authors

• Patricia Snell Herzog, University of Arkansas

• Christina Ashley Williams, University of Arkansas