Galvanizing the “Missing Revolution”: Processes and Meanings of the Child/Adult Binary in the Social Construction of Age

Abstract

Sociologists understand that seemingly innate characteristics like race and gender are social constructs, yet a similar appreciation of age has failed to take hold. Using ethnographic, interview, and population-based survey experiment data, we interrogate the child/adult binary in the context of healthcare to illuminate processes through which age categories are essentialized and legitimated and thereby how age is socially constructed. People use hyperbolic language to position children as wholly innocent and limitlessly deserving and adults as agentic, responsible, and less deserving of healthcare resources. Individuals “do” age strategically to obtain resources, and institutions formalize the child/adult binary through arbitrary and sometimes contradictory criteria. Our quantitative data further find age to have outsized effects on perceptions of deservedness and responsibility compared with other categories of social differentiation.