Knowing divorce statistics changes how lay people approach marriage
Evidence
Anyone in a Western country who embarks upon marriage today, for instance, knows that divorce rates are high (and may also, however imperfectly or partially, know a great deal more about the demography of marriage and the family). Knowledge of the high rate of divorce might affect the very decision to marry, as well as decisions about related considerations—provisions about property and so forth. Awareness of levels of divorce, moreover, is normally much more than just consciousness of a brute fact. It is theorised by the lay agent in ways pervaded by sociological thinking. Thus virtually everyone contemplating marriage has some idea of how family institutions have been changing, changes in the relative social position and power of men and women, alterations in sexual mores, etc.—all of which enter into processes of further change which they reflexively inform. Marriage and the family would not be what they are today were they not thoroughly “sociologised” and “psychologised.” — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 109
Categorization
- XREF: Quotidian example of lay agents absorbing expert knowledge — the ‘lay mastery’ side of what Stevens (via facework vs faceless commitment) does with institutional norms.