Media Mentions

Article Mentions

The Partial Deinstitutionalization of Affirmative Action in U.S. Higher Education, 1988 to 2014

The New Yorker

It may turn out that the rise of diversity marked the end of the golden age of affirmative action. This summer, Berrey published a paper that analyzed the admissions practices of about a thousand selective colleges in America; she and her co-author, Daniel Hirschman, found that sixty per cent of them had race-conscious admission policies in 1994, but only thirty-five per cent did in 2014…

Social Class and Party Identification During the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Presidencies

Johns Hopkins University

On the cusp of last year’s presidential election, many working class voters who were once staunch Democrats had gone independent, opening the door for a non-traditional Republican candidate, a new Johns Hopkins University study concludes.

Futurity

“We found substantial change in party identification across the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama…”

Obesity Is in the Eye of the Beholder: BMI and Socioeconomic Outcomes across Cohorts

EurekAlert

Doctors have a specific definition of what it means to be overweight or obese, but in the social world, gender, race and generation matter a lot for whether people are judged as “thin enough” or “too fat,” according to a new Cornell University study.

Pysch.org

…In other words, “it looks like obesity is in the eye of the beholder,” said co-author Vida Maralani, associate professor of sociology.

Futurity

Gender, race, and age influence our perceptions of people as “too fat” or “thin enough,” research shows.

Medicine Health Network

“We find quite consistent patterns for white Americans across outcomes and over time. For white men, there was a penalty both for being too thin and for being too fat. For white women, thinner was nearly always better,” Maralani said.

Psych Central

While the medical community has a specific definition of what it means to be overweight or obese, in the real world, gender, race, and generation are key factors in whether people are judged as too fat, according to a new study.

Degrees of Difference: Gender Segregation of U.S. Doctorates by Field and Program Prestige

Inside Higher Ed

Study suggests that men are overrepresented in elite Ph.D. programs, especially in those fields heavy on math skills, making for segregation by discipline and prestige.

My Science

It is a truth universally acknowledged that many doctoral programs in the United States are stubbornly segregated by gender. Although women earn just under half of all doctorates in research fields, they are clustered in the language arts, while men are clustered in engineering programs, for example.

Cornell Chronicle

But Cornell researchers have discovered that gender also plays a role in “prestige segregation,” where men and women are clustered into doctoral programs that fall on different places on the prestige ladders of their fields.

Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures

Phys.org

The Fragmented Evolution of Racial Integration since the Civil Rights Movement

Phys.org

Racially segregated neighborhoods in the United States persist for many social and economic reasons. Yet new research shows that many racially diverse neighborhoods—seemingly a sign of progress in racial equality – are, in fact, segregating over time. These findings suggest greater racial segregation in U.S. neighborhoods within the next two decades.

A New Conservative Cold Front? Democrat and Republican Responsiveness to the Passage of the Affordable Care Act

The Washington Post

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton issued her defense of the Affordable Care Act and proposals to change the landmark health law, signaling the next battle in a war with all the signs of a political stalemate. Americans are basically evenly split…

Johns Hopkins University

The Affordable Care Act has eroded support for federal health care spending not just among Republicans, but for Democrats and Independents, a Johns Hopkins University study has found. Before the 2010 passage of the law widely known as “Obamacare,” as many as 86 percent of Democrats …

EurekAlert

NewsWise

Medical Xpress

Science Daily

Medical News Today

Futurity

 “Trivial” Topics and Rich Ties: The Relationship Between Discussion Topic, Alter Role, and Resource Availability Using the “Important Matters” Name Generator

Cornell Chronicle

The assistant professor of sociology in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences started an online survey by asking hundreds of people whom they had contacted to talk about “important matters.” Then he asked for examples of important matters …

Phys.org

Reporting results Nov. 10 in the journal Sociological Science, Brashears concludes: “When it comes to social support, it isn’t what you talk about that matters, but whom you talk to.”

 Secrets and Misperceptions: The Creation of Self-Fulfilling Illusions

ScienceDaily

Pro-life Americans are less likely to hear about the abortions women they know have had than are pro-choice Americans, an study shows. The findings point to a previously unexplored divide on the abortion issue: differences in perceptions of those we associate with.

MINNPOST

Cowan wanted to test three hypotheses about secret-telling in her study: 1) the less stigmatized a secret, the wider the number of people who hear about it, 2) people who hold positive attitudes toward a characteristic of a secret are more likely to be told it, and 3) the more stigmatized a secret…

Futurity

The results, which controlled for several variables, reveal that Americans who hold restrictive views on abortion are much less likely to hear of others’ abortions than are Americans who hold liberal views on abortion.

Health Canal

The study design, Cowan notes, reduces the likelihood that the results merely reflect association differences among groups—that is, pro-life Americans are less likely to say they know someone who has had an abortion because they tend to associate with those who are less likely to undergo this procedure.

Science 2.0

Cowan says that almost 33% of American women will have an abortion in her lifetime yet more Americans have heard of another’s miscarriage than abortion – 79 percent have heard of a miscarriage and 52 percent of an abortion. This discrepancy arises from differences in disclosure.

New York University

Pro-life Americans are less likely to hear about the abortions women they know have had than are pro-choice Americans, a New York University study shows. The findings, which appear in the journal Sociological Science, point to a previously unexplored divide on the abortion issue: differences in perceptions of those we associate with.

 Salon

 New research underscores what we already know: Women often keep abortions secret for fear of being stigmatized.

Think Progress

Nearly 80 percent of participants said they’d heard about someone else’s miscarriage, compared to just 52 percent of people who had heard about an abortion.

RH Reality Check

Several high-profile public figures, such as Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, Texas State Rep. Dawnna Dukes, and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, have recently made headlines by disclosing their abortions to the world. But a new study says that for most people, revealing the fact that they had an abortion is by no means that public of an act …

MTV Act

If you think that abortion stigma isn’t a big deal, consider how that affects people’s views on reproductive rights …

Daily Kos

If you oppose abortion, there may be something your friends aren’t telling you …

 The Community College Effect Revisited: The Importance of Attending to Heterogeneity and Complex Counterfactuals

Inside Higher Ed

Disadvantaged students who enroll at community colleges and who would not otherwise have attended college are more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree in the future, according to a newly released research paper.

UCLA Newsroom

More than 40 percent of U.S. undergraduate students attend community colleges and, of those, more than 80 percent say they want to earn bachelor’s degrees. But only about 12 percent complete their degrees …

 When Forecasts Fail: Unpredictability in Isreali-Palestinian Interaction

The Washington Post

Was this conflict predictable? In a general sense it seems almost inevitable. Hamas and the state of Israel have long vowed to destroy each other, and their resumption of violence can hardly be considered a surprise. But the timing of the conflict, sparked by murder and revenge – how could that be predicted?

 Unintended Consequences: Effects of Paternal Incarceration on Child School Readiness and Later Special Education Placement

Vox

A new study in the journal Sociological Science has found that boys whose fathers have gone to prison are less likely to have the behavioral skills they need to succeed at school by the age of five, and are more likely to have been placed in special ed by the age of nine. The paper, written by sociologist Anna Haskins of Columbia University, fills an important gap in the debate over mass incarceration and its impact on black men.

Parental Age and Cognitive Disability among Children in the United States

Live Science

Those high infant-mortality rates in youth, Cohen said, are “picking up the socioeconomic factors. It’s mostly poorer women or women from disadvantaged backgrounds who have children when they’re younger.”

JCC Conversations, Photos

 The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy

Atlantic Council

 Time as a Network Good: Evidence from Unemployment and the Standard Workweek

The New York Times 

Americans work some of the longest hours in the Western world, and many struggle to achieve a healthy balance between work and life. As a result, there is an understandable tendency to assume that the problem we face is one of quantity: We simply do not have enough free time. “If I could just get a few more hours off work each week,” you might think, “I would be happier.”

Stanford News

Stanford research studies how people in jobs and the unemployed value free time. Both groups experience greater emotional well-being on weekends and have declines when the workweek begins. The rise in well-being and happiness on weekends is largely explained by opportunities to spend more social time with others.

 The Structure of Online Activism

The Guardian

The study, published in the Journal of Sociological Science, looked at the Save Darfur page on Facebook. At its height, this cause was one of the largest on the social network. The research team analysed the behaviour of its members over a 989-day period.

Science News

Facebook conjured an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing,” sociologist Kevin Lewis of the University of California, San Diego says about the Save Darfur campaign.

Huffington Post

While Facebook has undoubtedly changed the way people mobilize around an issue — and has given a voice to activists who never before had the ability to speak out — the largest social networking site still doesn’t motivate donors to open up their wallets to give to a cause.

Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

There’s something that makes social media particularly conducive to callous self-promotion. Facebook allows you to receive “reputational benefits” without encouraging you to do anything behind the scenes.

UC San Diego News

Social media may fuel unprecedented civic engagement. Digital networks might make possible mass protest and revolution – think “Arab Spring.” But sometimes and maybe even most of the time, a new study suggests, the accomplishments of online activism are much more modest.

London School of Economics and Political Science

On the surface, the cause hit a nerve across the world. Yet what good came out of it? With that kind of membership, the online campaign should have been amassing millions of dollars through Facebook alone. 

 

Journal Mentions

 Scholastica Webinar: Inside the Editors’ Office with Olav Sorenson

 Scholastica interview with Jesper Sørensen

According to Sørensen, one of the top challenges and simultaneous best opportunities for new open access journals to develop a following is to find a unique niche in the marketplace. For Sociological Science, which was founded in September 2013, that niche came in the form of the founding editors’ shared desire to get articles to publication sooner, in order to prevent the stagnation of scholarly work on novel research concepts.

Stanford D School interview with Sarah Soule

The daunting demand to publish in journals with an arcane peer-review system is a common pain point for many academics. The traditional model’s lengthy review process and expensive subscriptions also make interesting and impactful findings generally inaccessible to the public. But a Stanford-led group of professors is giving social scientists another option.

Stanford GSB News

Soule is among seven prominent sociologists at major universities who hope to disrupt the way academic publishing is done in their field by launching a new online journal,Sociological Science, on Tuesday, Feb. 18. The academic editors, headed by chief editor Jesper Sørensen, also a Stanford GSB professor, promise to give authors an up or down decision within 30 days and to publish an accepted research paper within a few months. The journal will be free for everyone to read online.

MIT News

Online journal adopts an open-source model and aims to publish papers “as written” to foster debate and speed access to research.

Cornell Chronicle

Weeden says the nonprofit journal’s main goal was to shake up top-tier sociological publishing by offering an alternative to the standard editorial model. The journal takes advantage of low-cost, open-access publication platforms, an approach that gives sociologists a forum for public engagement and a way to help shape public discussion and policy debates.

Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies

The paper explores evidence from an online dating community involving more than 250,000 people in the United States about the frequency with which individuals both express a preference for same-race romantic partners and act to choose same-race partners.