Different Time Frames, Different Futures: How Disadvantaged Youth Project Realistic and Idealistic Futures

Existing sociological literature provides conflicting theoretical accounts of disadvantaged youth’s aspirations. While structuralists and rational choice theorists contend that disadvantaged young people tend to form low aspirations in the face of limited structural opportunities, cultural sociologists maintain that disadvantaged youth construct highly aspirational imagined futures to claim their moral self-worth in the present. I argue that incorporating time frames into the study of aspirations helps resolve the tension by enabling researchers to investigate when—in what time frame—one model works better than others. I demonstrate the value of this approach using qualitative interviews with 31 eighth-grade students in China’s rural Shanxi Province, where structural constraints of socioeconomic attainment undercut cultural ideals of social mobility. In this context, findings show that respondents focused on practical constraints from their academic performance and family economic strains when projecting their short-term futures (structural/rational choice model) while they constructed future selves distinctive from rural origins in their long-term futures (cultural model). I conclude by discussing this approach’s implications for studying aspirations, expectations, and their relationships to educational and career outcomes.