Abstract
Immigrant obesity and distrust toward non-believers: New research from the journals.
Trust and Multiply
As women across the world flooded the workplace, and fertility patterns shifted in response, researchers noticed persistent differences between countries. In some nations, as women entered the workforce, birth rates dipped dramatically and have yet to recover. In others, small dips in birth rates quickly stabilized. Some researchers think these differences reflect cultural priorities around personal development. Others argue that different gender expectations shape what people were willing to do: if women in one country couldn’t expect their husbands to chip in more with housework, for example, it made sense that they might have fewer children.
Jerry Lai, Flickr
In a recent issue of Social Forces, researchers proposed an additional explanation for the differences between nations. Using the World Values Survey, Arnstein Aassve, Francesco Billari, and Lea Pessin found that nations with higher levels of generalized trust showed smaller dips in fertility associated with increased education for women. Generalized trust refers to the attitude that, in general, people are trustworthy and good, and it may be important to fertility processes because many working women have to outsource childcare to people who are not family members. A willingness to do that may be shaped by their beliefs and assumptions about whether that’s a safe idea, and if women in a nation believe that they can’t trust their children with people they aren’t related to, their education levels and participation in paid work might have a bigger impact on the number of children they wish to have.
This finding suggests that more state funding for child care (a popular and successful strategy for bolstering the birth rate in many nations) may not be equally successful in all places. States with lower levels of social trust may have to explore additional policies.
Distrusting American Atheists
Well, that’s taking it a little far.
Dave Riggs, Flickr
The Constitution protects U.S. citizens in their choice of religion, and, for many, religion is closely tied to American identity. It is, perhaps, why so many citizens distrust their atheist counterparts.
New research by Penny Edgell and colleagues, published in Social Forces, updates this longstanding finding. They report that the only religious group that faces more hostility than atheists are Muslims, and there has been little progress in the last decade. Perceived lack of a moral center—which extends to citizenship and national identity—seems to be the primary reason Americans don’t trust atheists. Interestingly, people who identified as spiritual but not religious were perceived more favorably than atheists, but this growing group is also tainted by mistrust.
The persistence of negative attitudes toward atheists, in spite of changing political and social circumstances, suggests that religiosity and American ideals about morality are difficult to disentangle and even more difficult to change.
Class and Gender in Hiring for Elite Jobs
Social class is not a protected status under U.S. employment law, so employers may consider class when making hiring decisions. To examine how employers evaluate social class in an elite labor market, Lauren Rivera and András Tilcsik applied a three-pronged approach, the results of which are published in the American Sociological Review. Rivera and Tilcsik undertook an audit study of 316 law offices, a survey of 210 practicing lawyers, and interviews with 20 attorneys responsible for hiring at large law firms. The audit study submitted four kinds of resumes, signaling social class background (high or low) and gender (woman or man), for advertised summer associate positions in large U.S. law firms, jobs that often lead to full-time job offers. In response, 16% of higher-class men received a callback—significantly greater than the percent of lower-class women (6%), higher-class women (4%), or lower-class men (1%) who were invited for an interview.
Newly minted law school graduates at Williamette University.
Yovany Camacho, Flickr
The results were similar in the survey, in which participants were asked to evaluate one of the resumes used in the audit experiment. On average, hiring managers scored the higher-class man significantly stronger than the higher-class woman, lower-class woman, and lower-class man. The interviews revealed that, compared to lower-class candidates, higher-class men and women are viewed as fitting in with the culture and clients of a law firm. Gender matters in that higher-class women were considered less committed to the demanding schedule required of lawyers. Interview respondents expressed concern that higher-class women might “opt out” and leave paid employment entirely, injecting stereotypes about marital status and parenting even though the resumes signaled that candidates were single and had no children. On the other hand, respondents assumed lower-class women would have significant law school debt and thus would be eager and committed to the law profession, suggesting the motherhood stereotype applies more to higher-class women—a form of “anticipatory discrimination” about potential parenthood status.
The Persistence of Racial Boundaries
The relative rarity of Black/White interracial relationships has long represented rigid social boundaries. However, the prevalence of these relationships has increased, which many consider evidence that the importance of racial hierarchies is on the decline. One way to measure whether or not race is a status marker on marriage markets is whether people “trade” race for other status resources, such as higher education levels. In their recent Sociology of Race and Ethnicity article, Florencia Torche and Peter Rich investigate whether and how status exchange in Black/White marriages and cohabitations has changed since 1980.
Status exchange posits that in order to “win” a higher-status White partner, racial minorities must exchange socioeconomic resources. That is, Black partners with high levels of education, particularly Black men, will partner with less-educated Whites. Using U.S. Census data from 1980 to 2010, Torche and Rich investigate whether the prevalence of status exchange has changed over time, whether the prevalence of status exchange differs between marriage and cohabiting Black/White relationships, and how exactly status exchange works in Black/White relationships.
Contrary to what an increase in Black/White relationships over time may imply, status exchange between Black and White partners is observed at the same levels in 2010 as in 1980, and status exchange does not vary between marriage and cohabitations. The authors further find that this status exchange operates such that both Blacks and Whites with higher education levels are both more likely to partner with Whites, indicating that these status processes are not purely an exchange of race status-for-education. People with higher education status, regardless of race, are more likely to have a higher racial status partner. Even as Black/White relationships have become more common, racial hierarchies have retained their salience for relationship formation.
Socarxiv Promotes Open Sociology
A new paper server for the social sciences, SocArXiv (pronounced sosh-archive), launched in December, with the goal of promoting rapid sharing of academic research. The non-profit system promises researchers a free, open access platform for distributing their work. But is sociology ready?
A lot of sociologists have complaints about our journal publishing system. They think it takes too long, with reviews often dragging on for months or even years before papers are published. The results of that review process often seem arbitrary, with the whim of a single reviewer or editor determining the outcome rather than a broader assessment of the quality of the work or its impact. And the final result is usually gated behind a paywall that limits access to other academics (and those with flush library budgets in particular).
In response, some sociologists have created new journals—such as the independent Sociological Science, or the American Sociological Association’s Socius—that promise quick turnaround decisions, fewer revision loops, and open access to all readers in return for page charges for the authors’ institutions.
One avenue that sociology has not yet actively explored, however, is the robust distribution of preprints or working papers. For several decades, math and physics papers have been distributed in pre-publication form on the giant, open-access arXiv.org paper server—which now annually serves 100 million free copies of more than 1.2 million papers. In economics, the most prestigious and influential papers are often distributed in early form by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But sociologists mostly don’t share their work openly before (or even after) it’s published in a journal (books are a whole different story). For example, most papers at our annual conferences are not made available for general readers, a practice increasingly common in other disciplines.
In a statement published on the SocArXiv blog, SocOpen.org, sociologist Katherine Newman, provost at UMass Amherst, called the initiative “an exciting opportunity to democratize access to the best of social science research.” She added, “This will assist the nation’s academics in making clear to the public why their work matters beyond the ivy walls.”
SocArXiv is a collaboration between a group of sociologists and librarians, working with the Center for Open Science, with funding from foundations that promote open scholarship and an administrative home at the University of Maryland (where it is directed by Contexts co-editor Philip Cohen). They hope to make the archive a permanent piece of the research infrastructure, eventually hosting open-access journals with peer review and promoting a more open and transparent approach to sociological research.
How the Media makes Protests Matter
The impact of a protest is only as big as the media makes it out to be. Past studies have explored protests’ effectiveness in bringing about the changes they demand. Now, Rens Vleigenthart and colleagues are considering how protest influences political action through mass media coverage, across countries and political agendas. The authors treat mass media coverage as a signal to political elites, and find that protest only has an effect on political action if it is covered by mass media.
Journalists take turns getting their shot of the best-lit protester at Occupy Wall Street, 2012.
Timothy Krause, Flickr CC
The researchers studied almost 5,000 protest events with some 50 million participants using protest, media (newspaper), and parliament data from the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Belgium, and France. Protests affected the questions brought up in parliament, but the significant effect of protest on government action is entirely accounted for by media coverage. Without media coverage, protests don’t impact political agenda-setting.
Taking advantage of the cross-national nature of the data, the authors were also able to identify a moderate effect of political context in bringing about policy-maker action. When a government is labeled as a majoritarian democracy versus a consensus democracy, the effect of protest coverage is stronger. This implies that the shock of a protest has more effect on governments that are more closed off to their constituents.
Obesity, Gender, and Immigrant Generations
People with lower income and education have poorer health outcomes in general. But health status and mortality rates among Hispanics and Latinos don’t follow the same patterns. In what’s known as the Hispanic paradox, their health outcomes are comparable to or better than non-Hispanic Whites, despite lower socioeconomic status and fewer resources, on average. Writing in Demography, Michelle Frisco, Susana Quiros, and Jennifer Van Hook ask how this concept applies to childhood obesity, finding that gender and immigrant generation each play a role.
Anti-obesity initiatives should not treat all immigrant children alike.
Keoni Cabral, Flickr CC
Using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Studies, the authors analyzed data on White and Mexican-origin children aged 2 to 15. Overall, non-Hispanic White children had lower odds of obesity than did children of Mexican origin. However, for boys, the odds of obesity were higher regardless of immigrant generation; among girls, that difference doesn’t emerge until the third generation. The researchers speculate that girls in immigrant families may be less exposed to American over-eating culture than boys, because girls have greater connection to their families of origin.
Highlighting both gender and generational differences, the authors note that their findings call for more targeted health interventions with immigrant children. Children of Mexican origin represent a range of experiences and exposures, so public health policies that treat these children as a homogenous group are insufficient.
Who do you Think You Are?
We know that people in surveys over-report behavior seen as positive and under-report unacceptable behavior. But why would they do that even in anonymous mail-in or online surveys? Writing in Social Psychology Quarterly, Philip Brenner and John DeLamater seek to address this phenomenon using identity theory—in short, the authors believe self-reported behavior patterns become measures not simply of what people do, but of who they think they are.
Q5: “Bro, do you even lift?”
isolethetv, Flickr
Surveys asked 285 undergraduate students at a public, Midwestern university about their identities based on their daily activities. The students then sent text-message reports of their activities over the next five days. The students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: some were told that physical fitness activity was the focus of the study (“directive”), the others were not. Then researchers checked student reports of exercise against campus facility records to measure any over- or underreporting of exercise.
Students over-reported their exercise in surveys, compared to their text-message reports and facility records and those in the “directive” condition claimed to have done more exercise than those who were not. The discrepancy was larger among students with low exercise-related identities (based on the survey). Brenner and DeLamater suggest it is due to their desire to avoid a greater discrepancy between the actual self and internalized societal norms—a disconnect that has been linked to depression and feelings of failure.