Research:

More recently Barrie Thorne studies children. Thorne began her study of children by simply observing them. She was interested in boys and girls daily lives and how they act out gender roles at a young age. Dr. Thorne studied children from all backgrounds and classes. She avoided the world of adults in order to find out how children create the world for themselves. She “hung out” at playgrounds, classrooms, lunchrooms, and other places dominated by children, to surround herself with a population of children. Barrie Thorne put together a team of multilingual graduate and undergraduate students to assist her in her research. Hanne Haavind was an inspiration to the way Thorne views the relationships between parents and their children.
In her book Gender Play, she discusses the results of almost a year of research focusing on children. She reports that even on the playground gender roles are being acted upon. Boys are expected by society to be more “active” which resulted in them being more watched by the adults than girls. The girls are expected to be more passive. She suggests that biological determinism should not be applied with these children which would allow them to act more naturally and cross the invisible lines of gender.
In 1985 Barrie Thorne and Judith Stacey wrote The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology. They had both gone to graduate school at Brandeis University Sociology Department. Thorne said that her work at Brandeis could not have prepared her for the realities of mainstream sociology.
Until 2002 Barrie Thorne and her colleague Arlie Hochschild are co-directors the Center for Working Families at the University of California Berkeley. At the center they experimented with new ways to pay attention to how children are active participants in all of life. Thorne worked to bring information about families to the medias attention.
She is currently the U.S. editor of childhood, a global journal of child research, and she is on the chair of the American Sociological Association Section on the Sociology of Children and Youth. Barrie Thorne is on the advisory board for the Beatrice Bain research group, which focuses its studies on gender. She is also a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways Through Middle Childhood.