CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025

Friday, October 11th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)

What’s a Parent to Do?
Socioeconomic Variation in Parenting Logics Measured
with Computational Text Analysis

Orestes "Pat" Hastings

Associate Professor of Sociology
Colorado State University

Leading theories on parenting in the United States suggest that parenting varies widely by socioeconomic status, with middle-class parents practicing “concerted cultivation”—marked by parents’ intensive efforts to foster their children’s development—and working-class parents engaging in the “accomplishment of natural growth”—with children given more freedom to manage their own time.

While frequently inferred that these parenting practices reflect different cultural logics of parenting, such logics are inherently hard to measure.

This talk presents a novel way to study parenting logics using computational text analysis applied to a nationally representative survey where respondents provided parenting advice in hypothetical parenting situations.

Analyzing this advice using Biterm Topic Modeling we find that nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting, but within that are multiple nuanced versions varying across two dimensions: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting, and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting.

Using fractional multinomial logistic regression, we find little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, suggesting more similarity across groups and more variability within groups than commonly understood.

This work is part of a broader project to understand the socioeconomic correlates of parenting and their implications for children’s outcomes.

Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!

To find out more:

• Personal Website
• Institutionnal
• Google Scholar