Maryland Population Research Center

Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Email: mmilkie@socy.umd.edu
Phone: 301-405-6428
Office:4133 Art-Sociology

CV

Publications

Grants

Recent Scientific Accomplishments

Milkie’s work focuses on the relationships among social statuses, culture, and well-being. A basic question underlying much of her research is how cultural meanings are a fundamental aspect of social differentiation and inequality. It addresses how cultural meanings attached to social statuses and roles--for example, the “ideal? female, the “good?father, or the stereotyped African-American--become manifest in people’s attitudes, behaviors, and self-concepts, how these are contested and change; and how these cultural forces affect individual well-being. This scholarship is critical because of its empirical analysis of culture as a stratification force and its revealing of how the meanings, beliefs and practices that are connected to social locations of gender, ethnicity and social class reverberate powerfully in people’s lives. Milkie’s approach extends symbolic interactionism, an important social psychological perspective, by illuminating the differential power of females and ethnic minorities to create cultural and social definitions and by examining disparities in the form of a greater gap between ideals and realities for one group compared with another. For example, she shows how unrealistic beauty images act as a powerful indirect force for white girls: even though they are critical of these, beliefs that others see the images as normative, and use these as standards of evaluation, depress girls?well-being. Much of Milkie’s recent work has examined gender ideals, roles and identities in families and how they are and are not being re-written in a changing world. This research provides an important extension to family theories through illuminating the subtle ways in which gender meaning systems are central to inequalities in family relations. In a book published with colleagues this year, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (2006), Milkie frames the cultural backdrop of mothering and fathering behaviors during the era, illustrating the changing meanings of these gendered roles through empirical analyses. Here too, the disjoint between cultural ideals and realities captures gendered inequalities in people’s lived experiences. In other work, too, published in top sociology and family journals, Milkie and her colleagues illuminate the consequences of the gendered meaning system, i.e., one in which different expectations and experiences for men and women are contained within seemingly neutral roles like spouse, parent and worker.

Funded Research

Milkie is a co-investigator on a NIA-funded project, “Status Inequality, Stress and Health among Older People,? in which Leonard Pearlin is the principal investigator (P.I.). She has an R03 pending that focuses on explaining why problematic behaviors and emotions exhibited by children are treated one way for whites and boys and different ways for children for whom the future means less anticipated success. Seemingly “objective?behaviors take on different meanings based on the kind of child exhibiting it. At the same levels of problematic behavior and emotions (as rated by parents and teachers), the most advantaged group, white boys, are more likely to be channeled to medical professionals for their problems in the ensuing two years, while others are less likely to be so directed. Interestingly, the school culture also affects whether children will be channeled toward medical worlds. The higher the percentage of white children in the school, the more likely a child’s behavior will be seen as a medical problem, above and beyond the individual child’s social statuses. An R03 research proposal related to this work is under review at NIH.

Future Research Plans

Milkie has several papers in progress from her current research on children’s social statuses, cultural inequalities, and well-being. In the future, she plans to further examine how inequalities shape children’s lives and experiences by focusing on their own reports of school and peer experiences. Moreover, she plans to supplement data from a nationally representative sample (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten cohort), with in-depth interviews of parents and teachers in order to complement her work on children’s social locations and well-being.

Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743