By Karen Sternheimer
We have written a lot about social roles on the Everyday Sociology Blog. Back in 2020, Jonathan Wynn wrote about the role a department chair plays within a university. Within this post, he described Robert Merton’s definition of social role sets:
A role might be a patterned set of expectations, but a role set is a complement of several roles, which can, in turn, create conflicting expectations and therefore, stresses. Such a development of the concept is connected to larger organizational structures.
We can experience role strain when our various social roles produce challenges, as Jennell Paris wrote about during the pandemic, when many people were working from home and had to be parents and employees at once. Role conflict can happen when the multiple roles we play might be incompatible, as I wrote about in 2024 when encountering my dentist at a small dinner party.
We all have social roles that connect us to the larger social structure and various social institutions. It can be unexpectedly challenging when the roles to which we have become accustomed shift.
Take the role of student, for instance. When you become a college student, this role is likely to be different than your prior experience of being a student in high school, especially if you are several years removed from that role. Maybe you are new to the technologies commonly used in your classes, or out of practice managing multiple deadlines.
Even if you aren’t returning to the role after some time off, it can come as a shock for those who have felt like they knew how this role should be “played.”
College students have much more leeway to schedule their classes, and thus they must learn how to manage their daily activities differently than high school students. They might be accustomed to receiving certain grades, which might shift suddenly—what was considered great work in high school might only be evaluated as good or acceptable in college courses. As the amount of reading increases, as does the caliber of their classmates, the expectations shift.
Another major role shift happens as students transition from being minors to legal adults. They may live away from their parents for the first time and have far more autonomy than they are used to having. Coming home for the first break may be a challenge for both college students and their parents. Parents were used to setting the rules and may still expect to do so, but their young adult student may bristle under previous expectations.
In high school, students are mostly minors, and many of their parents tend to play a large role in their educational experience. From writing excuse letters to contacting teachers, this kind of parental behavior changes when their students enter college. I once had a student tell me that he was going to be missing a week of classes because his family was going on a cruise, and that he would have a note from his parents. At the college level, notes from parents carry no weight.
Other parental roles also change when their kids become adults. Unless their student signs a privacy waiver, by law, faculty members cannot discuss anything about their coursework, even if they are footing the bill for their education. Their final grades are private; even if their student fails all of their courses parents paid for, they are not entitled to that information.
The challenge of this shifting role is so significant that many university orientations have programs for parents on how to do it. For example, many programs offer advice about allowing their student to make their own decisions when facing adversity or difficult decisions. But some parents still to try and intervene when a class their student wants to take is closed or a petition for an exception to university policy is denied. Parents might file complaints if they think a professor is “mean” to their student or otherwise is difficult to deal with. We’ve had parents complain if a sick professor cancels class “too often.”
Social roles shift even if adult children comply with their parents’ expectations. They may begin making decisions that their parents don’t approve of—like changing majors—or other things that they don’t share with their parents. Allowing young adults a higher level of privacy can be difficult for parents who are used to monitoring a teen’s social media accounts or tracking them on an app.
In school and in the workforce, people begin to have other authority figures, and eventually might become authority figures themselves. Likewise, parents might need more from their adult children as they get older. I have had several students from low-income backgrounds who are expected to help their parents with siblings and finances. In this case, the role shift from high school to college student can become even more difficult.
All social institutions have roles, and this include role shift. Workplace roles can shift when a new supervisor steps in or new policies are in place, for instance. What other examples of role shift can you think of?