Race, class, and gender

This chapter presents key questions that sociologists consider when studying young people, findings from those studies, as well as a discussion of the methods they employ and data they analyze. It then discusses potential contributions sociology of children and youth may make to human rights research and what human rights scholarship may contribute to sociology of children and youth. Sociologists of children and youth have demonstrated that young people's experiences have changed, over time contends that mortality levels among young people were so high prior to the Industrial Revolution that parents sometimes did not attend their child's funeral. In the analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth for the years 1979 to 1998, link data from young people and mothers to find that teenage childbearing, controlling for background and other factors, has limited impacts on both mother and child. Human rights scholarship teaches us many lessons to sociologists of children and youth.