Q.In what different ways do peer groups, schools and mass media each shape a young person's socialisation?

Peer groups, schools and mass media are three distinct, non-family agencies of socialisation, and each shapes a young person through a genuinely different mechanism, which is part of why their combined influence produces such varied outcomes across individuals in the same society.

Peer groups are made up of friends of roughly the same age -- the word 'peer' itself means 'equal' -- and this rough equality is exactly what distinguishes peer influence from family influence. Where parents can enforce rules of conduct on children fairly directly because of their authority, peer relationships are comparatively egalitarian, giving children a setting where behaviour and rules can be tested, pushed back on and negotiated among near-equals rather than simply imposed from above. This dynamic does not end with childhood either; informal same-age groupings, at work or elsewhere, continue shaping people's attitudes across adult life.

Schools, by contrast, socialise partly through their stated, formal curriculum -- the subjects actually taught -- but just as significantly through what sociologists call a hidden curriculum: implicit lessons children absorb from routine school practice that no lesson plan states outright, such as the common, unstated expectation in some schools that girls rather than boys will sweep the classroom, quietly teaching a gendered division of labour through repetition rather than instruction. …