Racial, Ethnic, and Income Factors in the Epidemiology of Neonatal Mortality

Abstract

receives further confirmation and is extended to cover the ambitions of middle-class boys as well. Mobile working-class boys were much higher than nonmobile working-class boys and somewhat higher than unambitious middle-class boys in the percentage who said that they had middle-class friends. In the number of extracurricular clubs to which they belonged, mobile working-class boys were close to ambitious middle-class boys, substantially higher than unambitious middle-class boys, and more than twice as high as nonmobile working-class boys. These findings support the hypothesis advanced by Beilin, Wilson, and Turner, that anticipatory socialization into middle-class values by middleclass peer groups helps to explain the upward mobility of working-class boys. Our findings also extend the anticipatory socialization hypothesis to cover middle-class as well as workingclass boys. A working-class boy was most likely to aspire to a high-ranking occupation if he had been influenced in this direction by both parents and peers, and least likely to be a highaspirer if he had been subjected to neither of these influences. Among the middle-class boys, only those low in both influences differed significantly from the rest, though the direction of relationships in all cases paralleled those found among working-class boys. Of the two types of influence, that of parents appeared to have the stronger effect. Working-class boys influenced toward upward mobility by either parents or peers tended to have higher aspirations than middle-class boys not influenced toward high aspirations by either parents or peers.