Welcome to our Work Group Socialisation Research!

In our work group, we focus on processes of socialisation. Conceptually, we assume that actors have a structured scope of options, which they reproduce or modify by acting. Our research seeks to answer how social order is produced. The very same processes that produce order bring about inequalities. Thus understanding social ordering is vital for understanding social inequalities.

We analyse socialisation according to different phases of life (especially childhood and youth), settings (e.g. family, school, university, peers, work) and phenomena (e.g. taste, friendship, migration). Our theoretical perspective is grounded in symbolic interactionism with a special emphasis on social inequalities.

Currently, we have several research interests. In one of the research projects, we investigate socialisation in transnational spaces. Our focus in this project is on the situation of children who stay in the country of origin while their parents work abroad temporarily. We ask questions like: What is socialisation like for these children? How do the children perceive their present situation and how do they envision their future? How does “doing family” work across borders? How does the family order change due to the parents’ absence? What is the significance of social media (e.g. Skype) for the families? These and many other questions are part of this project. Another ongoing research project is on the social worlds of refugee children in Germany. Some of the questions we address are: How do the children deal with different expectations of parents, peers and teachers? What relationships do they perceive as being important in their lives? We investigate these and related questions in group discussions and qualitative interviews (using network cards) with refugee children.